Nikhil Prasad Fact checked by:Thailand Medical News Team Feb 08, 2025 3 hours, 29 minutes ago
Medical News: A New Hope for Patients with Kidney Disorders
Immune-mediated glomerular diseases, a group of conditions affecting the kidney’s filtration system, have long been a challenge for doctors. These diseases, including lupus nephritis and membranous nephropathy, can lead to kidney failure if not managed properly. Researchers from the University of Medicine and Pharmacy "Grigore T Popa" in Romania, Charles University in the Czech Republic, and Koc University in Turkey have been exploring a more effective treatment approach known as multitarget therapy.
New Approaches in Treating Immune Mediated Glomerular Diseases
This
Medical News report focuses on the new findings in treating these diseases. Multitarget therapy involves using a combination of drugs that work together to control the immune system’s attack on the kidneys. This method has shown promising results in recent studies and could change how these diseases are treated in the future.
Why Current Treatments Are Not Enough
Traditional treatments for immune-mediated glomerular diseases rely heavily on immunosuppressive drugs such as steroids, calcineurin inhibitors, and cyclophosphamide. While these medications help control the disease, they often cause serious side effects, and many patients do not achieve complete remission.
For example, up to 60% of patients with membranous nephropathy fail to go into remission within a year of treatment. Additionally, lupus nephritis patients only achieve partial or complete remission about 60% of the time, with many experiencing relapses.
Given these limitations, researchers have turned their attention to multitarget therapy. Instead of using a single drug, this approach combines different medications to attack the disease from multiple angles. By doing so, doctors hope to improve treatment effectiveness while reducing harmful side effects.
The Promise of Multitarget Therapy
Multitarget therapy has been studied extensively in lupus nephritis, with impressive results. A clinical trial conducted in China compared multitarget therapy to standard treatment in patients with lupus nephritis. The multitarget therapy group received a combination of tacrolimus, mycophenolate mofetil, and steroids, while the standard group received cyclophosphamide and steroids. After 24 weeks, 83.5% of patients in the multitarget group achieved remission, compared to only 63% in the standard treatment group.
Another study followed patients for an extended period and found that those who continued multitarget therapy had lower relapse rates and fewer side effects compared to those on standard therapy. These results have led experts to recommend triple therapy as the preferred treatment for lupus nephritis in new guidelines.
New Insights for Membranous Nephropathy Treatment
Membranous nephropathy, another immune-mediated kidney disease, has also seen encouraging results with multitarget therapy. Typically, patients are treate
d with either rituximab or calcineurin inhibitors. However, a new approach combining rituximab, low-dose cyclophosphamide, and steroids has shown significantly higher remission rates.
A study including 60 patients with membranous nephropathy found that 100% of those receiving multitarget therapy achieved partial remission, and 83% reached complete remission within two years. This is a major improvement over previous treatments, where complete remission rates were much lower. The multitarget approach not only achieved faster results but also maintained remission longer, with fewer patients experiencing relapses.
The Future of Kidney Disease Treatment
While multitarget therapy shows great potential, more research is needed to confirm its benefits for different patient groups. Most of the studies conducted so far have been in Asian populations, and researchers need to determine if similar success can be achieved in other ethnic groups. Additionally, new drug delivery methods, such as nanoparticle-based treatments, are being explored to make these therapies even more effective.
Despite these uncertainties, the progress in multitarget therapy represents a significant advancement in the fight against immune-mediated glomerular diseases. By combining multiple drugs with different mechanisms of action, doctors can better control the disease while minimizing harmful side effects. Personalized treatment approaches using biomarkers may further improve outcomes, allowing patients to receive therapies tailored to their specific disease characteristics.
The study findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal: Life.
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/15/2/243
For the latest on Immune Mediated Glomerular Diseases, keep on logging to Thailand
Medical News.
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