Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2023 Jul 10:15:333-353.
doi: 10.2147/RRU.S385836. eCollection 2023.

Promising Experimental Treatments for Lupus Nephritis: Key Talking Points and Potential Opportunities

Ana Neves  1 , Luísa Viveiros  2 , Veronica Venturelli  3 , David A Isenberg  4
Affiliations
Review

Promising Experimental Treatments for Lupus Nephritis: Key Talking Points and Potential Opportunities

Ana Neves et al. Res Rep Urol. .

Abstract

Lupus nephritis (LN) is a frequent and serious complication of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), impairing patients' quality of life and significantly increasing mortality. Despite optimizing the use of conventional immunosuppressants and other biological drugs, its management remains unsatisfactory. This is mainly due to the heterogeneity of SLE, but also to insufficiently effective treatment regimens and clinical trial limitations (strict criteria, low number of patients included, and side effects). Most clinical trials of new biological therapies have failed to meet their primary endpoints in both general SLE and LN, with only two biological drugs (belimumab and anifrolumab) being approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of SLE. Recently, several Phase II randomized controlled trials have evaluated the efficacy and safety of new biologics in LN, and some of them have demonstrated an improvement in clinical and laboratory measures. Multi-target therapies are also being successfully developed and encourage a belief that there will be an improvement in LN outcomes.

Keywords: biological therapies; lupus nephritis; systemic lupus erythematosus; trial.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Dr Veronica Venturelli reports non-financial support from Boehringer Ingelheim, outside the submitted work. D.A.I. has received honoraria from Amgen, AstraZeneca, UCB Pharma, Vera Therapeutics, Merck Serono; personal fees from Eli Lilly. These honoraria are passed onto a local arthritis charity. The authors report no other conflicts of interest in this work.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Immunopathology of lupus nephritis. Created with Biorender.com.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Immunological targets of novel therapeutic agents in lupus nephritis. Created with Biorender.com.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Bruce IN, O’Keeffe AG, Farewell V, et al. Factors associated with damage accrual in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus: results from the Systemic Lupus International Collaborating Clinics (SLICC) Inception Cohort. Ann Rheum Dis. 2015;74(9):1706–1713. doi:10.1136/annrheumdis-2013-205171 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Moghaddam B, Marozoff S, Li L, Sayre EC, Zubieta JAA. All-cause and cause-specific mortality in systemic lupus erythematosus: a population-based study. Rheumatol. 2022;61(1):367–376. doi:10.1093/rheumatology/keab362 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Rovin BH. Systemic Lupus Erythematosus. 5th ed. Academic Press; 2011.
    1. Hanly JG, O’Keeffe AG, Su L, et al. The frequency and outcome of lupus nephritis: results from an international inception cohort study. Rheumatol. 2015;55(2):252–262. doi:10.1093/rheumatology/kev311 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Borchers AT, Keen CL, Shoenfeld Y, Gershwin ME. Surviving the butterfly and the wolf: mortality trends in systemic lupus erythematosus. Autoimmun Rev. 2004;3(6):423–453. doi:10.1016/j.autrev.2004.04.002 - DOI - PubMed