Grant: Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

Transplantation has revolutionized the lives of patients with kidney failure, being the only therapy that prolongs life span and improves quality of life. Donor kidneys, however, are in very short supply, such that patients must wait up to 8 years for a transplant, and in many cases never receive a kidney. With this shortage in mind, doctors are forced to accept kidneys for transplant from sicker donors. While many of these kidneys are suitable for transplant, some unfortunately are already injured when they are transplanted. Ultimately, the end result is that some patients who wait years for a transplant end up receiving kidneys that work less well, and which fail prematurely, forcing patients right back on the long transplantation wait list. Scarring is the most common and important type of injury seen in donor kidneys. Unfortunately, doctors have very limited ways to assess this chronic damage, relying instead on non-specific and insensitive measures that do not reliably measure the degree of kidney scarring. There is a desperate need for accurate tools to assess the degree of injury in potential transplant kidneys, and that predict how well these kidneys will function in the long term. We are working to develop a new cutting-edge technique called photoacoustic imaging to measure scarring in transplant kidneys. Our ultimate goal is to help doctors better select kidneys for transplantation, and thus improve kidney transplant outcomes by better allocating the scarce kidneys available. Our St. Michael's Hospital-based multidisciplinary team, composed of kidney doctors, radiologists, pathologists, and physicists, is uniquely suited to conduct these studies. Most importantly, working with a world leading industry partner with key connections to transplant centres across Canada, we are ideally positioned to translate our research findings into clinical practice.