Projects

This project aims to improve and personalize the management of minimal change disease (MCD) in children and adolescents by identifying glomerular podocyte markers to supplement the diagnostic kidney biopsy with added prognostic value and to subsequently assess non-invasively treatment response and stable/relapsing disease course. The project involves proteomic evaluation of micro-dissected glomerular podocytes obtained from archival kidney biopsies with MCD of a local detection cohort and of two external validation cohorts from different cohorts (Norwegian, Swedish and from the UK). Thereby, we will investigate a multi-omics features of MCD to add prognostic value to the renal biopsy. We plan to detect and subsequently validate those potential markers in serum and/or urine specimens of our young MCD patients.

Statistical machine learning methods will be developed and applied to integrate key omics-based findings of serum and/or urine samples with more routine clinical (e.g. blood pressure), laboratory (e.g. serum creatinine, albuminuria, and anti-nephrin antibodies) and personal (e.g. sex, age) patient features to define a prognostic non-invasive MCD test.

Finally, a prospective national - possibly international including UK/Sweden - multicentric clinical trial to validate the prognostic MCD test will be initiated in Bergen.