Potential New Treatments for Chronic Kidney Diseases: A Concise Review

Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) affects about 37 million Americans. Approximately 20% of patients with high blood pressure and 33% of patients with diabetes have kidney disease. CKD is most common among people aged 65 or older and is slightly more common in women. It substantially impacts certain ethnic groups more than others and is associated with a huge financial burden. End-Stage Kidney Disease (ESKD) is treated with dialysis or a kidney transplantation. CKD and ESKD are very detrimental and expensive illnesses, demanding creative therapeutic interventions to enable better management and enhanced clinical outcomes. Toward this goal, agents from various novel drug classes showed promising safety and efficacy in patients with varying severity of CKD in several phase 2 studies. This concise review will shed light on the clinical trials of runcaciguat, cotadutide, osocimab, and Endothelin Receptor Antagonists (ERAs) in patients with CKD and/or ESKD. These drugs were retrieved following surveying the Clinical Trial database as well as the Pubmed database, both maintained by the US National Library of Medicine.