Drugs like Ozempic are improving kidney treatment and changing lives

This article is part of “Innovations In: Kidney Disease,” an editorially independent special report that was produced with financial support from Vertex. More than one in seven people in the U.S. have chronic kidney disease, which was the ninth-leading cause of death worldwide in 2023. But until recently, just one class of drugs—called renin-angiotensin system (RAS) inhibitors—had been shown to slow progression of the illness, and even those medications were only modestly effective. For decades.