The most important advances in nephrology

Jürgen Floege, MD, is a professor of medicine, director of the Division of Nephrology and Clinical Immunology at the University Hospital RWTH Aachen, Germany, and Distinguished Fellow of the European Renal Association – European Dialysis and Transplant Association (ERA-EDTA).

If you were to name the 3 most important recent advances in nephrology that are relevant for everyday practice, what would they be?

Very clearly, in nephrology, the discovery that sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 (SGLT-2) inhibitors work in every kind of chronic kidney disease is my number one choice.

The number two choice is less obvious, but it’s the long-term realization that blood pressure should not be low. It should be really low.

And number three I think is the recent discovery of mechanisms of diseases, which have given us totally new insights. And I think the most prominent example is membranous nephropathy where we now have a biomarker, that is, autoantibodies, which we use to guide our treatment. So we’re getting a little more into, let’s say, personalized medicine.