In a recent manuscript in Kidney International, the UCI-led publication, in collaboration with clinicians from the Department of Pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCI, highlights new insights into the molecular mechanisms that drive kidney disease.
Specifically, new underlying connections have been observed between bone and kidney.
“Osteocytes are bone cells embedded within the calcified bone matrix that secrete factors to orchestrate myriad physiological processes,” says corresponding author, Lauren Albrecht, assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences. “In the case of kidney disease, osteocytes become dysregulated and secrete factors that promote abnormal renal function. This is important as targeting the signaling pathways in bone cells could offer a new avenue for developing therapeutics in kidney disease.”
Kidney disease is a progressive condition that affects over 10% of the general population worldwide and more than 1 in 7 adults in the United States.
“Treatment options are extremely limited for patients, which highlights the need for developing new therapeutics,” says Albrecht. “Several recent exciting advances have contributed to global understanding the molecular basis of organ crosstalk between the bone and kidney through large-scale analyses of kidney disease cohorts and novel models of disease. Together, this line of investigation opens new druggable targets that have the potential for precision medicine such as proteins in the Wnt signaling pathway.”
Careful monitoring of the levels of secreted factors in circulation of kidney disease patients dramatically improves the options for non-invasively diagnosing and assessing disease across a spectrum of pathologies. The researchers hope that future work aimed at identifying the relative impact of novel circulating factors in combination with antibody-based interventions could help solve major limitations of current approaches to treatment options of kidney disease.
