US and Japanese research team report
[의학신문·일간보사=정우용 기자] A protein that aggravates kidney disease caused by diabetes has been discovered.
An international research team at Harvard University in the United States and Nihon University of Medicine in Japan conducted a large-scale survey of diabetic patients to confirm that the protein ‘NBL1’ is involved in the onset of end-stage renal failure that requires artificial dialysis treatment, and to evaluate the risk of end-stage renal disease in diabetic patients. It was announced that it is paying attention as an outcome that helps in the development of therapeutics targeting markers and NBL1.
The research team conducted a large-scale analysis using blood samples collected from a total of 754 diabetic patients visiting the Jocelyn Diabetes Center at Harvard University and Pima Indian diabetic patients in Arizona, USA, who are known to have a high incidence of type 2 diabetes due to their genetic characteristics.
The research team measured the protein involved in the ‘TGF-β signal’, which is the cause of tissue fibrosis resulting from organ damage, from a blood sample and analyzed the patient’s end-stage renal disease incidence for 10 years after blood collection. As a result, patients with end-stage renal disease within 10 years had higher levels of NBL1 in their blood than those who did not.
In addition, as a result of examining the blood NBL1 concentration and the extent of renal tissue damage in diabetic patients, it was found that there is a deep relationship between the abnormality of ‘phodocite’, which plays an important role in urine filtration, and renal fibrosis. In addition, cell death was found to be induced by the addition of NBL1 to kidney tissue such as podocytosis in cell experiments. This result suggests that NBL1 itself is the cause of exacerbation of diabetic nephropathy, and the relationship between NBL1 and kidney disease, which has not been known so far, has been revealed.
The research team said, “It is expected that this will lead to the development of a marker that investigates the risk of renal failure in diabetic patients and a treatment that targets NBL1.