Treatment of the acute respiratory distress syndrome with Keratinocyte growth factor: another failure to account

Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is a life-threatening clinical syndrome defined as an acute and severe diffuse lung injury of known origin (1). The mortality rate for ARDS is still high, although it has decreased in the last decades (2). Current treatments are only supportive and there is no effective therapy interfering with the molecular basis of ARDS (3,4): in fact, despite extensive research, almost all promising potential therapies have proven unsuccessful in clinical trials. This is also the case of a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase II trial evaluating the keratinocyte growth factor (KGF) for the treatment of the ARDS (KARE trial), which has been recently published in the Lancet Respiratory Medicine (5).