Imaging project launched to transform treatment of kidney disease

A research team led by the University of Nottingham, has been awarded a grant by the the Medical Research Council (MRC) to enable the clinical translation of renal imaging and transform the way kidney disease is diagnosed and treated. The University of Nottingham has been awarded £783,190 to work on this partnership grant alongside the University of Cambridge , University College London , and University of Leeds , together with the charity Kidney Research UK. 10% of the world's population has chronic kidney disease (CKD) with causes including; acute kidney injury, diabetes and high blood pressure. More effective treatments to slow down the progression of the disease are urgently needed, but this will require better diagnostics to identify patients most in need of treatment. In recent years, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has emerged as a promising new non-invasive approach for assessing, monitoring and managing kidney disease. Professor Susan Francis from the Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre (SPMIC ) at Nottingham is leading the project and explains how MRI can help in managing kidney disease: "These new non-invasive renal MRI methods will allow various aspects of the kidney's function to be assessed by imaging the organ itself. Imaging the kidney using MRI has the potential to improve the management of kidney patients through better diagnosis, better assessment of prognosis and the effect of therapy, and accelerating new drug discovery." Demonstrating that functional MRI improves patient outcome requires conclusive clinical trials, but this is currently difficult due to the lack of standards and practical methods that enable studies of sufficient scale.