Grant: Catalyst Grant: Personalized Health Catalyst Grants

IgA nephropathy (IgAN) is a type of kidney disease that results from the immune system attacking the kidney, and can only be diagnosed using a kidney biopsy. Although there are effective treatments, they have many side-effects and should be used only in patients at the highest risk of progressive loss of kidney function. However, this requires the ability to identify patients at high risk, and there is currently no established method to do this. Previous efforts at creating prediction tools to identify high-risk patients have been limited because they were not validated in different ethnic groups, were very inaccurate, did not include findings from the kidney biopsy to improve accuracy, and were not designed for easy use in clinical practice. This project is a large international collaboration of prominent researchers in IgAN that merges 7 different databases from North America, Europe, China and Japan to create a new prediction tool in IgAN with improved accuracy, that includes kidney biopsy findings, and that is validated in different ethnic groups worldwide. We will convert the prediction tool into an app for use on mobile devices and a web-based calculator so that it can be easily used. In addition, patients with IgAN and physicians will be interviewed to determine ways in which the prediction tool, mobile app and web calculator can be created so that they are easy to use in clinical practice and address the needs of physicians and patients alike. This project will create the first prediction tool that can reliably identify high risk patients so that treatment can be given only to patients at highest risk, while lower risk patients can be spared the side effects of unnecessary therapy.