Editorial: Innovative biologics and drugs to target renal inflammation

Abstract

Editorial on the Research Topic Innovative Biologics and Drugs to Target Renal Inflammation The prevalences of acute kidney injury (AKI), chronic kidney disease (CKD), and end-stage renal disease (ESRD) are increasing globally and are associated with an escalating socioeconomic burden (Jha et al., 2013; Wang et al., 2016; Hoste et al., 2018). It is now well recognized that acute and chronic loss of kidney function lead to dramatically increased risk for cardiovascular events and death and that CKD is associated with significantly poorer health-related quality of life (Wang et al., 2016; Lv and Zhang, 2019; See et al., 2019). These fundamental insights into the worldwide trends and consequences of kidney disease highlight the importance of research focussed on developing new strategies for the prevention and treatment of AKI and CKD. One important pathophysiological process that links virtually all forms of kidney disease and their cardiovascular and other complications is inflammation (Swaminathan and Shah, 2011; Kurts et al., 2013; Rabb et al., 2016; Sarnak et al., 2019). It is now well recognized that production of inflammatory mediators is directly triggered by programmed cell death pathways, metabolic dysfunction and endoplasmic reticulum stress within renal parenchymal cells and results in exacerbation of tissue injury during AKI and CKD (Mulay et al., 2016; Sarnak et al., 2019). Furthermore, dysregulated immune cells contribute to progressive fibrosis of the kidney as well as to acceleration of vascular injury in CKD/ESRD (Kurts et al., 2013; Mulay et al., 2016; Rabb et al., 2016; Sarnak et al., 2019). Over the past two decades, advancing knowledge of intra-renal inflammatory pathways and of resident and recruited immune cell populations within the kidneys has unearthed new opportunities for the development of mechanistically informed, anti-inflammatory therapies for kidney disease (Kurts et al., 2013). More recently, evidence has emerged from a small number of clinical trials, that such strategies can be effective in slowing the progression of renal functional loss (Perez-Gomez et al., 2016; Menne et al., 2017; Nowak et al., 2017). The goal of this Research Topic was to highlight recent basic, pre-clinical, and clinical progress and opportunities related to the targeting of renal inflammation using drugs and biologic agents by publishing relevant full-length and short original research communications and review articles. In the remaining sections of this editorial, we briefly describe and discuss the implications of the eight excellent contributions made to the Research Topic by groups of investigators from Asia, Europe, and North and South America.