Researchers wondered whether dapagliflozin could also protect failing kidneys directly, independent of its effect on blood sugar. They enrolled patients with chronic kidney disease, roughly a third of whom did not have diabetes at all, to find out.
In the DAPA-CKD trial, researchers led by Hiddo Heerspink of University Medical Center Groningen randomized 4,304 patients with chronic kidney disease to dapagliflozin or placebo. The trial stopped early: dapagliflozin cut the risk of a combined outcome, a halving of kidney function, kidney failure, or death from kidney or heart causes, by 39 percent, with or without diabetes.
The result turned a diabetes pill into a kidney drug in its own right, now prescribed for chronic kidney disease regardless of diabetes status. An independent monitoring committee ended the trial ahead of schedule because the benefit was already clear, after a median of 2.4 years, and deaths from any cause were also lower on the drug.
Read the original study
Heerspink et al., NEJM, 2020 · doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2024816
A diabetes pill became a kidney drug.
Source
- Heerspink, H. J. L., Stefánsson, B. V., Correa-Rotter, R., Chertow, G. M., Greene, T., Hou, F.-F., Mann, J. F. E., McMurray, J. J. V., Lindberg, M., Rossing, P., Sjöström, C. D., Toto, R. D., Langkilde, A.-M., Wheeler, D. C., & DAPA-CKD Trial Committees and Investigators (2020). Dapagliflozin in Patients with Chronic Kidney Disease. New England Journal of Medicine, 383(15), 1436–1446. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2024816