While there are no universally agreed-upon biomarkers to achieve this goal, there has been substantial progress recently to detect blood biomarkers predictive of disease progression in IPF, such as markers of epithelial cell dysfunction and extracellular matrix remodeling: serum levels of surfactant protein A (SP-A) and D (SP-D) have been found correlated with reduced survival (Greene et al., 2002; Maher et al., 2017), and serum levels of Krebs von den Lungen 6 (KL-6) have been shown to be associated with acute exacerbations of IPF and mortality (Ishikawa et al., 2012; Maher et al., 2017). The gene discussed is MUC1; the disease is idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.