【Current status of kidney diseases and potential of cell treatment】
Most kidney diseases have a potential of progressing to chronic renal failure and main causes of kidney diseases are considered to be diabetes and high blood pressure.
Although currently available therapies for kidney diseases, such as dialysis and administration of hypotensive or immunosuppressive agents, can suppress the disease progression, there is no effective cure for renal failure except kidney transplantation. The number of patients is increasing about 10,000 per year and there are many patients who cannot receive medical treatments due to a chronic lack of donors or expensive costs of treatment.
Recently, however, it has been reported that injection of bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells improved the symptom of acute renal failure model mice. Stem cell transplantation therefore has been proposed to become one of the alternative approaches for the therapy of kidney diseases.
【Institutes conducting with animal experiments or clinical trials】
◆ Okayama University ◆ Nagoya University
◆ Tokyo University ◆ Osaka University
【Case : Nagoya University】
It has been reported that administration of adipose-derived stem cells was efficacious in animal model of intractable kidney diseases.
【Case : Tokyo University】
Stem cell infusion has been reported to reduce the elevated blood urea nitrogen and creatinine levels in acute renal failure model mice, suggesting that stem cells contributed to improve renal function in mice and that regenerative therapy using stem cells may be a feasible and useful approach in patients with renal failure.