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Finding new ways to treat for diabetic kidney disease

What is the problem with current treatments for diabetic kidney diease?

DKD is the leading cause of kidney failure in the world. In recent years some new treatments have been discovered, including SGLT2 inhibitors, which have been shown to slow down the progression of kidney disease in some patients, but these do not provide a cure.  

We know that patients with diabetes whose cells don’t respond effectively to insulin, a hormone that affects blood sugar, are more likely to develop severe kidney disease and kidney failure. Cells called podocytes, which form part of the tiny filters in the kidney, lose their sensitivity to insulin in diabetes.

Richard and the team used human podocyte cells in a dish to screen over 1,250 different drug classes, many of which have been used to treat other diseases (and have therefore been extensively tested), to see which ones made the cells more sensitive to insulin. One drug that increased insulin sensitivity was an ‘epigenetic modifier’- something that can influence how genes are turned on or off without changing the underlying DNA sequence.