Leading experts from 11 academic institutions, together with partners from industry, the Dutch and European Kidney Foundations, and the Dutch Medicine Evaluation Board announce the launch of PRIME-CKD. This is a consortium to validate and implement in clinical practice, novel biomarkers that predict the response to existing drugs used by patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD), in order to improve the management and prognosis of CKD patients.
PRIME-CKD is funded by the HORIZON Europe program. The total budget of the project is 9.9 Million Euro over a projected 5 year period.
The PRIME-CKD consortium is committed to demonstrating in the clinical setting, the utility of novel biomarkers as tools for better selection of drug therapies for patients, for use both in daily clinical practice and innovative clinical trials. Notably, the program will, for the first time in a chronic disease context, seek qualification through European Medicines Agency and FDA of these biomarkers for this purpose. “Results from this project are expected to translate into significant patient benefits. It will also lead to decreased societal costs associated with CKD by ensuring that patients receive the most effective therapy at the right time to slow or prevent the kidney failure requiring dialysis or transplant” said program coordinator Hiddo J.L Heerspink from the University Medical Center Groningen, Netherlands. “I am excited to be involved in the PRIME-CKD program which builds upon the strong kidney research pipeline and precision medicine vision developed in Europe over the last years” said Prof Maria F. Gomez PRIME-CKD steering committee member and coordinator of the BEAt-DKD consortium from Lund University Diabetes Centre, Sweden.
The PRIME-CKD program builds on breakthrough findings in the Innovative Medicine Initiative 2 program BEAt-DKD which was initiated in 2016 and identified novel biomarkers of disease progression and treatment response in patients with diabetic kidney disease. The PRIME-CKD consortium will advance these findings to clinical practice. It will bring together a synergistic group of stakeholders to develop the evidence based tools and roadmap to unlock the potential of precision medicine in the management of CKD.
