Latest Postings

Abacoa Town Center's Giant Halloween Block Party ( Penny Sheltz )
I-95 HOV Expansion Project ( Alicia De Fago )
Roger Dean Stadium...Let's Play! ( Amy Grant )
Announcing A New G.M. For Palm Beach Cardinals ( Amy Grant )
Mangrove Bay Halloween Party for Honor Flight ( Penny Sheltz )

share a story | more postings »

YourHub.com \\ Jupiter \\ Stories \\ Health and Fitness \\ Medicine, Health Care

Local charity sponsors important kidney research

e-mail to a friend | print this | link to this

Contributed by: JR Halpin on 7/24/2009

Multi-national Research Team Discovers Medical Breakthrough for Kidney Disease

Local charity sponsors important kidney research yielding significant and hopeful results

July 22, 2009 - (Jupiter, FL & Westport, CT) - The Halpin Foundation, a non-profit which focuses on medical research, is pleased to report that partner researchers from the University of Louisville and Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) in collaboration with scientists at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis in France, have identified an important antigen in patients kidney disease. The multi-national research team's finding has implications for the diagnosis and treatment of this disease, but also - and perhaps more importantly - may aid research in broader autoimmune diseases such as diabetes, asthma, multiple sclerosis, lupus and allergies. The findings appear in the July 2 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Senior author, Dr. David Salant, a professor of medicine at BUSM and chief of the renal section at Boston Medical Center said, "Identifying the antigen (PLA2R) will enable development of a simple blood test that could replace the need for a kidney biopsy and establish which patients are most likely to benefit from immunosuppressive treatment. Our findings show that PLA2R is a major target antigen in idiopathic membranous nephropathy (MN)."

Membranous nephropathy is debilitating disease in which the kidneys are attacked by one's own immune system, a condition afflicting over 100,000 Americans. This important discovery could lead to earlier diagnosis and new medicines.

Dr. Richard J. Glassock, of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said the finding has solved a mystery that has frustrated researchers for more than 50 years. He also believes that they will have a, "profound effect on how clinicians approach the diagnosis and treatment of membranous nephropathy" and called the study's observations, "seminal."

"To my mind, there most significant aspects of this finding are that is firmly establishes MN as an autoimmune disease, identifies the precise antigen actually in MN and puts the disease at the head of the line for researchers to prevent production of specific types of antibodies rather than suppressing all antibodies as we do now with steroids, cytoxan, cyclosporine etc - which causes major toxicity," stated Dr. William G. Couser, the Head of the Commission on the Global Advancement of Nephrology (COMGAN) and Co-chairman of the World Kidney Day Steering Committee for the International Society of Nephrology (ISN)

The Halpin Foundation is directed by J. R Halpin, who was instrumental in bringing together these diverse, dedicated and talented teams - the members of which worked tirelessly and selflessly toward achieving this important goal.

Funding for the study was provided by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, Amgen, The Halpin Foundation, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Association pour la Recherche sur le Cancer, and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Additional resources about the study:

New England Journal of Medicine

Louisville Courier-Journal

NEJM Full Text Article (sub)

About

The Halpin Foundation is a non-profit medical research organization that seeks to aid the medical community in understanding and overcoming genetic medical conditions. The foundation's grants are prioritized into two targeted goal areas: kidney disease research and autoimmune disease research. This year the Halpin Foundation partnered with the American Society of Nephrology (ASN) andawardedDr. Laurence Beck. Jr.,the lead researcher in this study, from the Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) , a grant for the continuation of his work on the PLA2R antigen. For more information about the Halpin Foundation, please visit http://www.halpin.org.

--30end30--

[Report this as objectionable content.]

SUBMIT COMMENT

Rate the above story