I thought it might offer a lead to do some research. Anyway, you would probably go about it by first trying to find what surface protein the immune system tends to targets in cases of IPF. Even if it's truly idiopathic, its still probably a particular class of proteins.

Once you knew that, it might be enough to encourage tolerance to proteins that are structurally similar. I can't remember the details but I think at some point they have to be capable of being absorbed through the intestinal wall, but I could be wrong about that.

Also it may not even be the entire protein that's the problem. It could be just a subunit in which case maybe tolerance could be induced with short peptides - although at this point I might be completely full of sh**. I'm just speculating from very limited knowledge.

The point is that the more you dig, the more interesting and possibly useful coincidences you might find. I was just trying to give you something to work with.

It looks like actress Rose McGowan also suffers from this disease and is trying to raise awareness .

I set a google alert for IPF.

Some more articles related to IPF

Support group helps lung disease patients

Intermune establishes the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation Care Center Network and Patient Registry

Here's something that might be interesting. MS is also an autoimmune disease and I ran across this today. If I'm reading it correctly, it seems to say that while vitamin D doesn't act as an immunosuppressant, it seems to play an important role in how the immune system functions. So on a lark I did a google on Vit. d and IPF. I only looked at a couple of the hits but they looked like they might be interesting. That link is copied from my browser so you might have to edit it since it says you're using firefox and are in the US. Not sure how that works.

Phase II clinical trial for new IPF drug FG-3019