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uab ucsd UAB-UCSD O’Brien Center for Acute Kidney Injury Research


Summary

The University of Alabama at Birmingham – University of California at San Diego (UAB-UCSD) O’Brien Center for Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) Research is an interdisciplinary center of excellence in AKI-related research. The overall mission of the UAB-UCSD O’Brien Center for AKI Research is to improve the health of patients by fostering research specifically targeted to the prevention and treatment of AKI and its complications. The two Biomedical Research Cores (a Clinical Core and a Pre-clinical Core) and Resource Development Core integrate existing intellectual and technological resources to provide the Consortium a set of services/resources for innovative investigation in AKI-related research.

Clinical Core

  • Description

    The Clinical Core catalyzes the translation of bench discoveries to applications that impact human AKI. They achieve this through providing access to curated clinical data from prior clinical studies and new harmonized real world multimodal data from electronic health records (EHR) to support epidemiological studies of AKI and clinical research, including AKI risk-classification, sub-phenotyping, and simulated trials. They also have access to biospecimens from prior studies hosted by the core. Below is a list of detailed services provided by this core:

  • Services
    • Study Planning and Design
    • Study Initiation and Conduct
    • Study Analysis and Interpretation
    • Biological Sample Repository
    • Cloud-based multimodal databases for AKI and critical care nephrology research studies
    • Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Support Services
      • Analysis of pilot data
      • Design of epidemiological, clinical studies or clinical trials
      • Sample size and/or power analysis
      • Analyses of study results
      • Database development
      • Forms, manual of operations, and/or instrument development
      • Data Safety and Monitoring
      • Big data transformation & pipeline development
      • Methodologies and Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Health

Pre-Clinical Core

  • Description

    The Pre-Clinical Core provides the facilities and requisite skills (Animal Models Resource) to generate and study murine models of AKI and provides unique facilities and requisite skills (Renal Physiology Resource) to determine renal physiological changes in AKI. Pre-Clinical s Core services include:

  • Services
    • Kidney ischemia/reperfusion (IRI)
    • Unilateral Ureteral Obstruction
    • Orthotopic kidney transplantation
    • Tail vein injection or venipuncture (per animal)
    • GFR (transcutaneous FITC-sinistrin) in rodents
    • Cannulation (indwelling with injection port)
    • Use of a microsurgical workstation (per hour)
    • Training (per hour/per day)
    • Misc. surgical services involving body wall penetration (per hour)
    • 5/6th nephrectomy (both steps)
    • Radio-telemetry determination of blood pressure:
      • 8-day exp. each animal
      • 10-day exp. each animal
      • 15-day exp. each animal
      • 30-day exp. each animal
    • LC-MS/MS Creatinine determination (per test)
    • Functional renal imaging (tracer dependent, per hour)
    • Structural and metabolic imaging (US, MRI, microCT) (per hour)
    • Nuclear imaging (Gamma camera, SPECT/CT, PET/CT) (per hour)
    • Optical Imaging (Bioluminescence, Fluorescence) (per hour)
    • Image Analysis
    • Whole kidney clearance/oxygen consumption studies
    • Tissue oxygen partial pressure determination in kidney
    • Determination of GFR in awake rodents
    • Micropuncture for nephron function and TG feedback
    • Metabolic cage experiments in mice (per animal and week)
    • Automated tail-cuff blood pressure determination (each, 6 days)
    • Laser Capture Microdissection from frozen tissue (~70 pieces individually collected per sample; sample quality and amount appropriate for RNA-Seq or potentially proteomics)
      • for glomeruli
      • for antibody-guided dissection of tubular segments

Resource Development Core

  • Description

    With both the clinical and pre-clinical cores, the Resource Development Core will provide a dynamic resource and platform to develop, test and refine innovations that will accelerate pre-clinical and clinical research. In the pre-clinical area, new analytical approaches in metabolomics as well as functional in vivo imaging will be incubated to probe unique biological characteristics of disease development. In the clinical area, tools for federated machine learning using big EHR data will be developed.

  • Services
    • Development of novel microfluidic methods aimed at high resolution molecular cartography in kidney tissue and molecular and functional kidney-specific imaging approaches in pre-clinical AKI.
    • Development of a federated learning platform using a collaborative digital workspace to support big EHR data analyses across multiple institutions.

Contact Information

If you would like more information regarding services provided by UAB-UCSD O’Brien Center for AKI Research, please contact:

Monica Vasiliu
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