Linda von Wartburg
Jan 17, 2011
Every time the heart beats, about 20 percent of the blood it pumps out goes to the kidneys to be cleaned.
A couple of pharma companies are working on a therapy that may do just that. Their treatment, called an SGLT2 inhibitor, causes your extra blood sugar to flow harmlessly away in your urine. To understand how an SGLT2 (sodium glucose transporter 2) inhibitor works, you have to know a little about what the kidneys do.
Every time the heart beats, about 20 percent of the blood it pumps out goes to the kidneys to be cleaned. The blood ends up in a tuft of tiny blood vessels, called a glomerulus, which is surrounded by a cup-like sac, called a Bowman's capsule. Each kidney has a million or so of these little arrangements.
High blood pressure in the glomerulus forces all the small molecules in the blood right through the blood vessel walls and into the Bowman's capsule, where they begin their journey down a little tubule toward the bladder. This liquid filtrate contains not only waste products, which the body wants to get rid of, but also a lot of useful molecules, which the body doesn't want to lose. One of those useful molecules is glucose. More>>>>>>>>>>>>>
