The development of interstitial lung disease (ILD) in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) leads to significant morbidity and mortality.1 ILD impacts approximately 10% of patients with RA and even higher percentages have subclinical ILD.2 3 Despite the clinical impact of ILD in a patient with RA, this comorbidity is poorly understood.

Recently, we and others have leveraged our understanding of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) to better understand RA-ILD given similarities in demographics, radiology, pathology, natural history and more recently genetics.4 Looking to large, unbiased ’omic-based analyses, including proteomics, to further our understanding of RA-ILD is a logical next step. These approaches could identify novel and shared biomarkers …