| Zusammenfassung |
The number of people being diagnosed with kidney failure is increasing. The treatments for the most severe forms when the kidneys fail completely are dialysis or a kidney transplant. Transplantation is associated with a better quality of life, greater survival, and is cheaper, saving the NHS more than £490 million per year. However, transplanted kidneys don‘t always work immediately, or they may be rejected. The most common way of finding out that there is a problem is by measuring levels of a substance (creatinine) in the blood and then taking a small piece (biopsy) of the kidney tissue but this has risks, is unpleasant for the patient and may be done too late when too much damage has happened. This project is aimed at finding better biomarkers, that is substances (proteins) which can be measured in a blood or urine sample and give us earlier information about whether the kidney is working properly, and if it isn‘t, help us decide quickly what is going wrong. This would enable us to treat the patient in the best way and prevent loss or misfunctioning of the transplanted kidney, both in the short and longer term. |
