Common drug could help fight kidney disease
Common drug could help fight kidney disease
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Tuesday, 21, Mar 2006 04:01
Scientists have discovered that a widely prescribed drug could have another purpose in treating kidney disease.
Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, studied the effects of rapamycin, which is currently used as an immunosuppressant to help prevent rejection of transplanted kidneys.
Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, the scientists suggest the drug could also be used to treat the inherited kidney disease known as ADPKD, autosomal-dominant polycystic kidney disease.
Over 600,000 people in the US, and 12 million worldwide, are affected by ADPKD. The disease is characterised by the proliferation of cysts that eventually debilitate the kidney, causing kidney failure in half of all patients by the time they reach age 50.
Currently no treatment exists to prevent or slow cyst formation, and most ADPKD patients require kidney transplants or life-long dialysis for survival, explained Thomas Weimbs, assistant professor in the department of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at UCSB.
He said the scientists first looked at the effects of rapamycin on mice.
"When we administered rapamycin to mice with PKD and looked at their kidneys afterwards, we were absolutely amazed," said Dr Weimbs. "The kidneys were smaller, had smaller cysts and had retained their function."
The team decided to follow kidney transplant patients that had been treated with tapamycin, as most keep their diseased kidneys and add a third healthy kidney. They identified four such patients and found that their polycystic kidneys shrank in size by 25 per cent over two years.
"Even though we only had a very small number of patients, this result is highly encouraging because it points in the right direction," said Dr Weimbs.
As rapamycin is already clinically approved for other uses, the researchers hope that will expedite the progress of clinical trials.