Metabolomic viability fingerprint during normothermic isolated kidney perfusion using tracer metabolomics

 The kidney is a complex puzzle of different cell types that carry out a multitude of life-sustaining biochemical functions. Acute kidney injury, caused by a lack of oxygen supply, is a major problem in medicine for which there are no reliable diagnostic tools.
TRACK investigates whether metabolic fingerprints of health and disease can be used to diagnose severity and reversibility of acute kidney injury.
Indeed, we hypothesise that the way the kidney uses nutrients (metabolism) is different in healthy and diseased states.
Unravelling and understanding the metabolism of a whole organ is not trivial. It requires new technologies that go beyond the standard approaches to trace metabolism and metabolic changes. We will therefore trace the fate of non-radioactively isotopically labelled nutrients throughout the metabolic network of the kidney (tracer metabolomics). In this way, we will create a first of its kind Google Map of the kidney’s metabolic paths.
This hypothesis is investigated in the setting of kidney transplantation, the most extreme form of exposure to an oxygen deficit the kidney can undergo. TRACK uses normothermic isolated kidney perfusion as a platform for this research as it mimics the early phases of transplantation.