In February I will have been a dialysis patient for four years. It’s an anniversary I’m not much looking forward to, but it’s certainly better than the alternative. Thirty years ago, had I been a kidney failure patient, I would have faced a death squad of medical professionals that would have had the sole determination of whether or not I would continue to live. Those relatively few deemed worthy of treatment were given dialysis treatments; everyone else was given morphine to ease the convulsions as they died a miserable death.
All that changed when end stage renal disease (permanent kidney failure) was covered under Medicare regardless of the age of the patient.
From the July 2003 issue of Nature Medicine comes news that a bone protein may actually reverse kidney failure ($$). Dialysis and transplant are both treatments for kidney failure, but they aren’t a cure. A reversal of the condition would legitimately qualify as a cure. Oh happy day!
Researchers at Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center have demonstrated that a specific protein, used to heal broken bones, can also repair and reverse chronic kidney disease. Chronic kidney disease is a precursor to—but decidedly different than—permanent kidney failure. It’s beyond my level of knowledge to ascertain whether or not this protein, bone morphogenic protein (BMP) -7, can reverse permanent kidney failure, although the article refers specifically to dialysis patients, and starting dialysis is what triggers the end-stage diagnosis.
According to Raghu Kalluri, the project’s lead researcher, BMP-7 was found to reverse “a process known as epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition, which generates scar-causing cells known as fibroblasts.” The protein works by reducing the number of fibroblast cells and replacing damaged cells with healthy epithelial cells. “In effect, BMP-7 is decreasing the bad cells and converting them into good cells,” Kalluri said.
The sole licensee for BMP-7 is Ortho Biotech, ironically the producer of PROCRIT (epoetin alfa), a very expensive drug most dialysis patients—including me—take to increase red blood cell levels.
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