Exosomal circRNAs in the plasma serve as novel biomarkers for IPF diagnosis and progression prediction.

"Declarations Ethics approval and consent to participateThis study was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee of Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital (No. AF/SC-08/03.0). Animal experiments were performed in accordance with the Ethics Committee of China Pharmaceutical University. Consent for publicationAll authors agree to submit the article for publication. Competing interestsThe authors declare that they have no competing interests. Wenhua Gan, Fengjuan Wang, Ke Zen and Hongwei Liang are co-inventors on the patent related to using the plasma exosomal circRNAs for IPF diagnosis and progression prediction. The application numbers are CN202110638461.1. Declaration of AI-assisted technologies in the writing processDuring the preparation of this work the authors used chatGPT in order to improve language and readability. After using this tool, the authors reviewed and edited the content as needed and take full responsibility for the content of the publication. Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Wenhua Gan, Fengjuan Wang, Ke Zen and Hongwei Liang are co-inventors on the patent related to using the plasma exosomal circRNAs for IPF diagnosis and progression prediction. The application numbers are CN202110638461.1. Declaration of AI-assisted technologies in the writing process During the preparation of this work the authors used chatGPT in order to improve language and readability. After using this tool, the authors reviewed and edited the content as needed and take full responsibility for the content of the publication."

"This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81900062)"