Stories about: FSGS

A 28-gene test for kidney disease

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dialysis nephrotic syndrome
Understanding the genetic causes of nephrotic syndrome could lead to better drug treatments that reduce the need for dialysis or a kidney transplant. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Nephrotic syndrome is one of the worst diseases a child can have. It strikes the filtering units of the kidney, structures known as glomeruli. There’s no good treatment: Steroids are the main therapy used, but 20 percent of cases are steroid-resistant. In the syndrome’s most severe form, focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS), children are forced onto chronic dialysis and often require a kidney transplant—often only to have their disease recur in the new organ.

Until recently, no one knew what caused nephrotic syndrome; the first causative gene was identified just a dozen years ago. The lab of Friedhelm Hildebrandt, MD, PhD, at Boston Children’s Hospital is one of a handful that’s been chipping away at the others.

Hildebrandt receives, on average, one blood sample a day from patients all over the world. …

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Decoding kidney disease, one gene at a time

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More than a third of chronic kidney diseases are caused by single mutations on single genes (Image: Graham Colm)

Part 2 of a two-part series on kidney disease. Part 1 is here.

Friedhelm Hildebrandt, MD, receives around one blood sample in the mail per day from a patient with chronic kidney disease. Over 10 years, he’s collected more than 5,000 samples from patients all over the world—in hopes of finding the genetic mutations that cause them and, ultimately, new treatments.

Consider the mutation in an 8-month-old boy from Turkey, who had fluid collection under his skin and elevated protein in his urine—signs that his kidneys were failing. Doctors identified his disease as a form of nephrotic syndrome, one of the three main types of chronic kidney disease. The disease was proving to be hard to treat: Ten weeks of steroids had produced no result, and an immunosuppressant hadn’t been effective enough to justify its harsh side effects.

Only within the last year, genetic research has revealed that more than 30 percent of childhood chronic kidney diseases—like this child’s—stem from single mutations in single genes.
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