Drug Development Tools for Kidney Disease: DDT-KD Consortium Planning Meeting

On September 25th, the Critical Path Institute (C-Path), in partnership with Dr. Chirag Parikh (Yale University) and Dr. Kumar Sharma (University of California, San Diego), sponsored a meeting to launch the Drug Development Tools for Kidney Disease (DDT-KD) Consortium. Dr. Amy Porter (C-Path) will work with Dr. Parikh and Dr. Sharma as Co-Directors of this new Consortium.
The objective of the meeting was to introduce the proposed consortium’s objectives to help satisfy an urgent need to coordinate efforts to develop and qualify improved biomarkers for chronic kidney disease (CKD) and acute kidney injury (AKI) as DDTs for specific contexts of use.

Proposed Consortium Objectives:

The overall objective of this new consortium will be to qualify biomarkers that can be used as Drug Development Tools (DDTs) to shorten the time needed to develop and deliver safe, effective treatments for patients with CKD and AKI.  The key steps will be the development of data standards for CKD and AKI, sharing data and results from clinical trials, evaluating novel biomarkers, and obtaining regulatory endorsement.  The biomarker qualification process for both CKD and AKI is likely to be similar as they share important biological pathways, and thus combining the effort for biomarker qualification for these two diseases will be synergistic.