BEAt-DKD

Blood vessels in the kidneys constrict which makes the vessel walls more permeable and stops renal corpuscles from filtering the blood efficiently. Diabetes-related kidney disease often ends fatally despite dialysis or renal transplantation – the mortality rate is even higher than most forms of cancer. Currently there is no form of therapy which can avoid or cure diabetic kidney disease.

A consortium consisting of more than 20 academic institutions based in Europe and the USA, various pharmaceutical and biotechnology businesses and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation have launched the BEAt-DKD (‘Biomarker Enterprise to Attack Diabetic Kidney Disease’) project with the aim of improving the options available to prevent and treat diabetes-induced kidney disease. The consortium plans to identify the mechanisms and signal pathways that are involved in the development of kidney damage in the presence of diabetes. It is hoped that once such mechanisms have been identified, these can be used as a starting point for the creation of new therapeutic approaches. Researchers also aim to pinpoint biomarkers such as proteins or metabolic substances which indicate disease development. These biomarkers should help to predict the course of the disease and treatment success leading to less extensive clinical trials and more accurate therapy.