Grant: Operating Grant

High blood pressure affects roughly 3 out of 10 Canadians and almost every one 9of us will become hypertensive at some point in our lives. There are several effective medications to treat high blood pressure, but they don't all work as well in every patient and many of them have side effects. As a result, only 2 of 3 hypertensive patients are properly controlled by current therapy. One of the major contributors to high blood pressure in humans is a protein called renin. Renin is first made as an inactive protein called prorenin. Prorenin has to be cut by an enzyme present in the kidney to be activated. The identity of the enzyme that activates prorenin is not known and the goal of this research is to identify that enzyme. Ultimately, development of a drug that could block this enzyme might lead to a new treatment for high blood pressure.