Washington, June 28: A protein used to heal fractured bones is effective in repairing and reversing chronic renal disease, a new study led by investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre has shown. The findings, published in the latest issue of Nature Medicine, could help lead to the development of a therapeutic alternative for the nearly 300,000 kidney disease patients who are currently undergoing dialysis. "Dialysis is not really a treatment, it`s just a means of survival until an opportunity for a transplant opens up", said the study`s senior author Raghu Kalluri, director of the Center for Matrix Biology at BIDMC and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

"This is a very tedious way of living life", he noted, explaining that the process of mechanically filtering blood through a machine to remove waste products must be performed several times a week for a period of three to four hours per visit, posing risks of infection and other side effects. Furthermore, the procedure is extremely costly.


This new study looked at the role of a molecule called bone morphogenic protein (BMP)- 7 which, in its recombinant form, has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of bone fractures. Earlier studies had revealed that BMP-7 is highly expressed in the kidneys of healthy individuals.

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The investigators used mouse models of chronic renal injury, characterized by the presence of scar tissue known as renal fibrosis; once kidney disease was well-established in the animals, they administered human recombinant BMP-7.



"We found that in the kidneys, BMP-7 reverses a process known as epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition, which generates scar-causing cells known as fibroblasts", stated Kalluri, explaining that BMP-7 first reduces the number of the fibroblast cells and then replaces the damaged areas of the kidney tubules with healthy epithelial cells.

"In effect", he added, "BMP-7 is decreasing the bad cells (in this context, fibroblasts) and converting them into good cells (in this context, epithelial cells)".
Bureau Report