SYSKID · Systems biology towards novel chronic kidney disease diagnosis and treatment

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) affects up to 10% of the population. Besides eventual progression towards end stage renal disease CKD impacts the patient’s quality of life by causing serious comorbidities including cardiovascular complications and bone metabolism disorders. On the everyday clinical level early stage diagnosis and tailored treatment of CKD are still inadequate. In addition, CKD seems not to have reached its appropriate emplacement in an epidemiological and healthcare perspective yet, and the pathophysiology of the disease on a molecular and cellular level is not well enough understood. Our sysKID consortium was installed for precisely addressing these issues: To unravel the molecular and cellular mechanisms of chronic kidney disease development, combine this information with clinical risk factors, and on this basis delineate chronic kidney disease biomarkers. These markers will allow us to perform preclinical studies of novel therapy approaches for halting disease progression, and will provide us with the materials for development and clinical evaluation of tools for early stage diagnosis as well as prognosis and treatment monitoring. sysKID assures a successful implementation of these goals by a truly international consortium of 27 leading research groups. We combine clinical know how, provide access to a huge chronic kidney disease sample and clinical data pool, and build a Systems Biology framework for chronic kidney disease by integrating molecular and cellular biology, computational biology, statistics and epidemiology. Our expert group is further complemented by a high level advisory board covering science, product development, and the patient’s perspective. sysKID implementation is structured for completing pre-clinical Proof of Concept studies of novel chronic kidney disease therapy regimes, and further for completing clinical evaluation of an epidemiological screening tool as well as of early stage chronic kidney disease diagnostic kits.