Study of hepatocyte growth factor in cyclosporine-induced nephropathy

Abstract Cyclosporine (CsA) has been widely used for the clinical transplantation of various organs such as kidney, liver, heart, and pancreas, resulting in great improvement of graft survival due to its superior anti-rejection activity. However, this immunosuppressive drug has several side effects, the most serious being nephrotoxicity. CsA-induced nephropathy is diagnosed by some clinical data, BUN, urine volume, and so on. Recently, FK-506 has been reported to have much higher immunosuppressive activity than CsA, but with a lower incidence of nephropathy. However, if we can detect drug-induced nephropathy before the changes occur in clinical data, treating nephropathy will be easier. To address this problem, we have examined the effects of CsA and FK-506 treatment on hepatocyte growth function (HGF) in rats models.