Professor Richard Coward from the University of Bristol has been awarded a research project grant of £230,000 to investigate a potential new treatment approach for diabetic kidney disease (DKD). New medicines like SGLT2 inhibitors can slow the disease, but they cannot cure it. In diabetes, the body’s cells can stop responding properly to insulin, a hormone that helps control blood sugar, which can damage the kidneys over time. A key part of this damage happens in podocytes, specialised cells that help filter waste in the kidneys.
Researchers tested over 1,250 existing drugs to see if any could improve how podocytes respond to insulin. One promising drug affects how genes are switched on or off without changing DNA itself. The team will now study whether it could become a new treatment for kidney disease.
“This project will be extremely useful to explore the possibility of altering how podocytes switch genes on and off in the setting of diabetes and if by altering this we can find a new treatment for this devastating disease. This work is the direct result of an extensive Kidney Research UK-funded drug screen we performed looking at human kidney podocytes in dishes in the setting of diabetes. It allows us to continue the discovery science which we hope will lead to new effective treatments for people experiencing diabetes-related kidney disease.” Professor Richard Coward.