Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Charlotte Jones-Burton is the Senior Vice President of Product Development and Strategy at Chinook Therapeutics, which is on a mission to change the course of kidney care by discovering and developing precision therapies to maintain kidney function in people who have rare, severe chronic kidney diseases. Charlotte explains, "Our lead clinical program is atrasentan, a highly potent and selective endothelin receptor inhibitor. We believe that it's going to be a best-in-class molecule that's going to target the endothelin pathway. And the condition for which we are developing it is IgA nephropathy. Now, IgA nephropathy is an autoimmune disease that attacks the kidneys, and it affects how our blood is filtered in the small blood vessels of the kidneys that I spoke about. And what happens with IgA nephropathy is that immune complexes can deposit in the kidney and really damage those filtering units inside the kidneys. And when this happens, individuals can have symptoms such as protein spilling into their kidn