Project description
Improving chronic kidney disease diagnosis
Chronic kidney disease (CKD) affects one in 10 people worldwide and can lead to severe health issues, including kidney failure and cardiovascular disease. It often progresses without noticeable symptoms, resulting in irreversible kidney damage by the time it is diagnosed. Current tests mainly focus on kidney filter function, missing critical signs of tubular injury. This oversight hinders timely treatment and worsens patient outcomes. The ERC-funded U-Tube project aims to change this by identifying new biomarkers for kidney tubular function. By studying urinary microcrystals and extracellular vesicles, U-Tube seeks to detect tubular injury earlier. This innovative approach could help develop a reliable test to predict CKD progression, enabling earlier treatment and improving patient care.
Objective
Chronic kidney disease (CKD) affects one in ten people worldwide and is often progressive. Progressive CKD not only causes kidney failure, but also premature aging, cardiovascular disease, and loss of quality of life. Currently, progressive CKD can only be diagnosed after irreversible damage to the kidney has already occurred. There is therefore an urgent need for earlier biomarkers.
The kidney consists of filters and tubules, but diagnosis of progressive CKD is currently based on filter function alone. This is surprising, as it is tubular injury that drives CKD progression, and it is the tubule that is targeted by recently developed kidney-protective treatments. U-Tube therefore aims to identify and apply next-generation biomarkers for kidney tubular function to facilitate the early detection and treatment of progressive CKD.
My central hypothesis is that the factors that cause tubular injury and CKD progression, are present in urine and therefore detectable as biomarkers. I will focus on urinary microcrystals and extracellular vesicles (EVs) as the drivers of tubular injury, which I will first study in tubuloids using a multi-omics approach. Subsequently, I will perform a large-scale analysis of crystallization and EVs in urine samples from people with stable or progressive CKD. I will then single out those biomarkers that can be targeted by kidney-protective treatment. These targetable biomarkers will be moved forward for the development of a high-throughput tubular panel that I will test for its potential to predict progressive CKD, compared to a gold standard test for tubular function.
U-Tube will use cutting-edge innovations to identify urinary biomarkers for tubular function that are targetable and implementable in clinical practice. If successful, it will advance the prediction of CKD progression, and as such redefine how we assess kidney health. By enabling early kidney-protective treatment, U-Tube has the potential to vastly improve CKD outcomes.
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
3015 GD Rotterdam
Netherlands