Biomedical Research Core

Abstract Pediatric Kidney BioMedical Core (pKidBIO Core) Kidney disease is a major cause of illness and death in infants, children, and adolescents with the incidence of end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) in these patients in the United States of about 15 per million. The rapidly increasing problems of adult hypertension and renal failure may also have roots in pediatric kidney insults that go undetected, unprevented and untreated. The development of effective interventions and methods of early detection and severity measurements of renal disease in children is lagging in part due to a lack of knowledge of physiological and pathological changes that occur as the kidney matures. Molecular blueprints would dramatically enhance our ability to design effective approaches to intervene and prevent kidney dysfunction. This goal cannot be met, however, without having a source of pediatric kidney tissue to begin molecular interrogations to identify the, uniquely human and developmental, ’omic instructions required to make and maintain healthy kidneys. The pKidBIO core, as part of the Washington University Pediatric Center of Excellence, is in an unusually strong and unique position to provide the required pediatric kidney tissues, originating from clinical biopsies or as “gifts of life” consented for research, preserved with methods shown to be compatible with the most recent technologies to enable age-specific research to dig into multi-omic single cell transcriptome and epigenome assays, molecular imaging and tissue engineering. By its design and nature, the pKidBIO core will promote enthusiasm and progress in pediatric kidney disease research by 1) providing human age-specific references for fetal and childhood kidney disease tissues, 2) enabling studies aimed to delineate cellular, morphological, physiological and molecular changes associated with postnatal kidney maturation, 3) accelerating scientific research aimed at ex vivo human kidney organoids, 4) establishing protocols for isolating differentiated kidney cell types at stages consistent with those seen in kidney tissue samples, 5) advancing drug toxicity screening, and by 6) designing validation studies of gene function and kidney engineering. The availability of the tissue and the outstanding data generated from them will attract new expertise outside kidney research developing spatial imaging and analytical technologies and research interested in physiological aging across the lifespan. The pKidBIO repository will be a national resource for the research and clinical community that is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.