Master Protocols: A Promising Approach to Accelerate Drug Development in Rare Kidney Diseases.

Abstract

Kidney diseases have been a highly challenging area for new drug development because of traditional requirements for reaching doubling of serum creatinine, dialysis, or transplantation endpoints for regulatory approval, which translates into clinical trials needing several years of follow up and large numbers of study participants to achieve adequate power. In recent years, however, progress in surrogate endpoints (specifically proteinuria reduction and slowing of estimated glomerular filtration rate decline in rare glomerular diseases) has resulted in greatly increased interest by biotechnology and pharmaceutical sponsors in investing in these indications.