Are There New Treatments for Kidney Failure?

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Type the question into a search bar and you will get whiplash: one page promises a breakthrough, the next warns of a scam, and a headline about a pig kidney makes it sound like everything changed last spring. Some of it is real. This article sorts the honest survey — what has genuinely moved in kidney medicine, what is still an experiment with a handful of patients, and what is marketing — with the same rule throughout: nothing here is a treatment you can ask for until your own care team says it is.

The Short, Honest Answer

The biggest real change is not a machine or an operation. It is a family of medicines, arrived over the last several years, that genuinely slow kidney disease down — proven in large trials, approved by regulators, and prescribed in ordinary clinics today. The headline science — pig-kidney transplants, regenerative research, the implantable artificial kidney — is real research at an experimental stage, measured in a few patients or in laboratories, not in treatment you can receive. Both halves matter. Confusing them is how people get hurt.

The Change That Already Arrived: Medicines That Slow the Slope

For decades, kidney care had two main levers for slowing chronic kidney disease — blood pressure control and a class of blood pressure medicines (ACE inhibitors and ARBs) that also protect the kidneys. The last several years added real reinforcements:

SGLT2 inhibitors. Medicines ending in "-gliflozin" (such as dapagliflozin and empagliflozin) began as diabetes drugs and turned out to protect the kidneys themselves. In large trials they substantially slowed the decline of kidney function and reduced the risk of kidney failure — in people with and without diabetes. They are now standard kidney medicine, and they pulled double duty by helping the heart as well, which is why the same drug names appear in our heart articles. If your kidney doctor has not mentioned one, it is a fair question to ask whether it fits your situation — fair to ask, not to start on your own.

Finerenone. A newer medicine for people with kidney disease tied to type 2 diabetes, which in trials slowed kidney decline and reduced heart complications. It requires potassium monitoring — one more reason these are prescription conversations, not shopping lists.

GLP-1 medicines. The semaglutide family, famous for diabetes and weight, was tested specifically for kidney outcomes in people with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease, and the trial showed a real kidney benefit — enough for regulators to approve a kidney-protection use. Research in this family is continuing.

None of these reverses kidney disease, and none replaces dialysis once kidneys have failed. What they do is change the slope — months and years of function that the older toolkit could not buy. For someone at stage 3, that slope is the whole game, which is why we wrote the honest companion piece, can kidney disease be reversed?

Help for People Already on Dialysis

The arrivals here are quieter. Newer medicines for the anemia of dialysis (which we discuss as part of the tiredness picture in why am I so tired after dialysis?), refinements in phosphate and potassium management, and wider access to home therapies that treat the body more gently than three weekly in-center sessions all count as progress — real, but incremental. If a headline ever tells you dialysis itself has been replaced, check it against this page: it has not.

The Headline Science: Pig Kidneys, Stated Carefully

In 2024, surgeons transplanted genetically edited pig kidneys into a small number of human patients — first-of-their-kind cases, done under special experimental permissions for people with no other options. The results were mixed in the way first attempts are: the organs worked, for weeks to months; the patients' overall health was fragile, and outcomes varied. Since then, regulators have cleared small formal clinical trials of pig-kidney transplantation — the step that turns individual experiments into actual evidence. Frame it exactly: this is a promising research direction involving, today, a few dozen people at most, under study conditions. It is not a waiting list you can join at your dialysis center, nobody honest can promise it will become standard care, and the people running it say so themselves. If it matures, it attacks the transplant shortage we describe in how long is the wait for a kidney transplant? — which is precisely why it deserves watching rather than either hype or dismissal.

The Earliest Stage: Regrowing and Rebuilding

Further out sit the laboratory sciences: growing kidney tissue from stem cells, building miniature kidney structures ("organoids") to study disease and test drugs, and the implantable bioartificial kidney we walk through in is there an artificial kidney? Drug-testing organoids may help patients soonest, by making new medicines safer to develop. A grown replacement kidney is the most distant item on this page — real science, earliest stage. And one bright red line: clinics that will take your money today for "stem cell therapy" to cure kidney failure are not part of this research. The researchers doing the genuine work do not sell it, and some of the sold versions have caused serious harm.

How to Read the Next Headline

Three questions sort almost any kidney breakthrough story. How many people? — one patient is a beginning, not a treatment. What stage? — "in trials" spans everything from a first safety test to a nearly finished approval study. Who is saying it? — a university or regulator is a different source from a clinic with a price list. The genuine progress in kidney medicine is real, and right now it mostly looks like this: the slope of the disease is getting gentler, years earlier than it used to. That is less dramatic than a headline — and worth more.

A survey of new treatments is the natural home for one more research direction — this Foundation's own. The Cardio Renal Foundation supports research toward a swallowed capsule designed to remove excess fluid through the digestive tract: not a kidney in a box, but an attempt at the fluid half of kidney failure, without a machine. It belongs on this article's list of honest attempts, with the same caveat as the rest — research, aimed at a future beyond dialysis.

At the Cardio Renal Foundation, we publish education for exactly this patient — the one whose heart and kidneys are failing together, and who deserves to know which hopes are medicine and which are marketing. Support from readers like you helps us keep publishing it.

This article is informational only and is not meant to replace the advice of your qualified healthcare provider. Never start, stop, or change a medicine on your own; whether any newer treatment fits your situation belongs with your own care team. As with any issues related to your health, check with your doctor.