WHAT IS written in your genes may well dictate whether you develop kidney failure caused by diabetes. An international team hopes to read the genetic code and reveal who is at greatest risk of the disease, writes DICK AHLSTROM
University College Dublin (UCD) is to play a key part in a €7 million study that will involve scientists North and South and also teams in the US. Announced this month, the Irish effort will be led by UCD’s Prof Catherine Godson.
The funding, €4 million of which will be used by Godson and her collaborators at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) led by Prof Peter Maxwell, comes via the US- Ireland RD Partnership, set up to increase collaborative research.
The goal of this project called Genie (Genetics of Nephropathy, an International Effort) is to search for the genes linked to a condition known as diabetic kidney disease.
About one in three patients with diabetes develop the disease over time and it is “the lead cause of end-stage kidney disease”, explains Godson, who heads UCD’s Diabetes Research Centre and is a Science Foundation Ireland principal investigator.
The puzzle is why some diabetics develop the disease and others don’t. “The kidneys just stop working and there is nothing you can do other than dialysis or transplantation,” she says.
This puts a huge burden on the health services, with about one-tenth of all money channelled into diabetes-related conditions. And the situation will only get worse given a sharp rise in cases.
“Diabetes is becoming a bigger and bigger problem,” says Godson. The Genie project is a major undertaking involving 2,500 diabetics who have had the disease for at least 15 years and 2,500 people with no signs of the disease.
The UCD and QUB researchers will collaborate with others from Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Given the scope of this kind of study, it is only possible to do it with international collaboration, Godson says.
It all comes down to comparing genes and the proteins they produce in diabetics, controls and also tissue samples recovered from patients with diabetic kidney disease. These will be provided by Prof Peter Conlon at Beaumont Hospital. This kind of comparative research is known as a “genome-wide association study” and should show how the activity of genes in the kidney varies from subject to subject. At the least, the research should reveal a way to predict which diabetics will get kidney disease.
There is also the possibility of new treatments that respond directly to what is changing in the kidneys of these patients.
“If we know what is involved then we might be able to intervene. Can we think of an intervention, like a drug or whatever?” Godson says. An earlier response should help these patients avoid complete kidney failure.