Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects (NSERC partnered)

Scarring is a major cause of kidney failure. The current method for scar detection is a needle biopsy, a procedure that not only requires anesthetics and can lead to bleeding, but also only samples a very small part of the kidney. Not surprisingly, patients are reluctant to be biopsied, and the limited information that the biopsy provides can often be misleading to clinicians making treatment decisions. Moreover, due to these limitations, pharmaceutical companies have had difficulty performing studies testing new anti-scarring drugs in animal models and humans. To address this issue, our multidisciplinary team, comprised of kidney doctors, radiologists, pathologists, physicists, and engineers, has developed new, needle-free magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-based techniques to rapidly and safely quantify total kidney scar burden. Our goal in this proposal is to validate these innovative MRI techniques as a way to measure kidney scarring in both animal models and humans. We expect that the development of these new, more patient-friendly tools will help clinicians make more informed treatment decisions, and will facilitate the development of new anti-scarring drugs. Given the immense health care burden associated with chronic kidney scarring, this proposal has the potential to provide significant health and economic benefits for Canada.