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Penn Medicine receives $17.5 million grant for chronic kidney disease research
Penn Medicine has received a $17.5 million grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases to further research efforts to prevent chronic kidney disease.
The grant will allow researchers to gather and study data from home and community settings of more than 3,000 adults who have CKD, according to a Perelman School of Medicine press release. Patients will be selected from the Chronic Renal Insufficiency Cohort Study, which has enrolled more than 5,500 patients. The latest phase of research will be conducted between 2018 and 2023.
Investigators will use mobile health trackers to measure physical activity, physiology and heartbeat data gathered from participants’ daily lives. The goal for this first path of research is to identify patients at highest risk of cardiovascular complications who may be able to receive effective preventative treatments.
The second area of research will deal with declining kidney function, with the goal being to detect periods of transient reductions in function. These will be detected by having patients take at-home blood samples to measure creatine, as well as by providing urine samples for protein measurements.
“By bringing together biostatisticians, epidemiologists and informaticians, we are delving deeper into this public health threat in an effort to identify potential interventions that can be tailored to the individual needs of patients suffering with CKD,” lead researcher Harold I. Feldman, MD, MSCE, said in the release.
Reference:
www.med.upenn.edu/
Disclosure: Feldman is a co-principal investigator on NIH grant, 2U24DK060990.