NIH Workshop to Accelerate Therapeutic Innovation by Optimizing Kidney Precision Medicine Clinical Trials

The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) sponsored a scientific workshop in 2024, titled "Preparing for Kidney Precision Medicine Clinical Trials." The purpose of the workshop was to gain a better understanding of the therapeutic journey of patients with kidney disease and define candidate indicators for precision medicine strategies, targets, and trial readiness. Workshop participants were tasked with identifying best practices, opportunities and barriers to kidney precision medicine clinical trials, with a shared goal to optimize the design and conduct of these trials. The patient perspective served as a foundation for the meeting. Trial design should be flexible, dynamic, responsive to transitions in patient care and minimize fragmentation of care. The value of understanding mechanisms and defining endophenotypes and targets to facilitate new therapeutic approaches was discussed with examples presented for acute and chronic kidney diseases. The importance of biomarkers for diagnosis and evaluation of therapeutic response was emphasized. Laboratory and assay considerations for precision medicine trials were discussed with examples of successful large precision medicine trials supported by laboratory networks presented. There was discussion of the barriers to precision trials in nephrology, including suboptimal patient engagement, precision trial expertise, infrastructure and financial resources. Engagement in demonstration projects to test the ability of various approaches to expedite the right treatment to the right patient was highlighted. Of utmost importance is the better design of clinical trials which consider differences in genetics and status of disease mechanisms to validate individual patient-focused innovative and effective precision therapeutic approaches.