Dr. Raghu has had a longstanding clinical and scientific interest focused on pathogenesis, diagnosis and management of ILD, idiopathic interstitial pneumonia (IIP), sarcoid, rheumatological lung diseases, and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). He is an international authority in these disorders.
Currently the director of the Center for ILD, he previously served as the Director and Medical Director of the UW Lung Transplant Program that he founded in 1991. Though no longer in leadership roles for the Lung Transplant Program, he continues to be the transplant pulmonologist for patients with ILD.
Dr. Raghu serves on several national and international committees for management of ILD and IPF as well as an ad hoc member of the NIH lung biology and pathology study section. He chairs both an international committee that develops and maintains evidence based guidelines for diagnosis and management of IPF and a committee developing clinical practice guidelines on diagnosis of hypersensitivity pneumonitis. He has also co-chaired international committees developing clinical practice guidelines on: 1) the clinical utility of bronchoalveolar lavage in the management of ILD and 2) bronchiolitis obliterans syndrome following lung transplantation. He has helped provided a consensus statement on chronic lung allograft dysfunction (CLAD) and served on a committee that wrote and revised the classification of IIP. Dr. Raghu is also an ad hoc advisory panel member for the FDA’s Division of Pulmonology, Allergy, and Critical Care. And he serves on the scientific advisory board for the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation.
Dr. Raghu’s 35+ years of research is devoted to both basic science (lung fibroblast and extracellular matrix) and translational and clinical studies in the field of pulmonary fibrosis, idiopathic interstitial pneumonias, and sarcoid. Having conducted several prospective clinical studies and trials in IPF and pulmonary fibrosis associated with scleroderma and sarcoidosis, he has helped provoke interest for new treatment strategies based on the pathogenesis of pulmonary fibrosis. He is active researcher and leader and is proud of his roles in the NIH-funded IPFnet clinical research network as well as other IPF clinical trials.
Dr. Raghu has published prolifically, authoring over 370 scientific articles and nearly 40 book chapters. He has served on editorial boards of Thorax, Current Opinion in Pulmonary Medicine, European Respiratory Journal, and European Respiratory Review, and on the advisory board for The Lancet-Respiratory Medicine. He is a frequent reviewer of manuscripts for journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, Thorax, American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, European Respiratory Journal, and Chest.
Above all, Dr. Raghu is a longstanding patient advocate and actively sees and manages patients with ILD every week at the Center for ILD at UW. In 1988, he founded a pulmonary fibrosis support and education group in the Pacific Northwest, the first and the longest active such group. Dr. Raghu still attends the monthly group meetings at UWMC-Montlake.
