Kidney disease

Little boy having an ultra sound on kidney

Kidney disease (also called renal disease) is a general term for when the kidneys don’t work properly, causing waste to build up in the body.

The kidneys filter or clean blood to remove waste and create urine. When not working properly, waste and fluid build up in the body.

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) refers to a permanent reduction in kidney function. Left untreated, this may progress to kidney failure and death. Patients with kidney failure complete dialysis, where a device filters the patients’ blood, or undergo a kidney transplant.

Kidney failure affects 12 million people worldwide but despite being a major chronic disease, treatment hasn’t changed in more than 70 years.

About 50 per cent of kidney disease in children is inherited and, in many cases, the disease-causing gene mutation is unknown, making diagnosis and treatment difficult.

Kidney disease can limit growth in children, plus cause fatigue and heart disease. It can reduce a person’s lifespan, quality of life and participation in activities.

Who does it affect?

One in 10 people have some form of kidney disease (which equals about seven million Australians) but most don’t know they have it
Kidney failure is increasing by 6 per cent a year
About 1,400 people are waiting for transplants and more than 28,500 are on dialysis
In 2017, 524 Australians aged 15 to 24 needed dialysis or transplant
One in 1,000 children are born with kidney defects and at least half who need dialysis or a transplant have a known genetic cause for their disease. But for most, little is known about how the disease develops.
Indigenous people have higher rates of kidney disease.

Our kidney disease research

With our partners, we treat many Australian babies and children with kidney disease.

Through our Kidney flagship program, we’re working towards new and urgently needed treatments and searching for causes and pathways in paediatric kidney disease.

Our Kidney Regeneration group grows models of human kidney. This world-first breakthrough uses stem cells derived from patients’ blood or skin samples. We turn these into kidney cells in the lab and grow models of human kidneys.

These personalised models have the potential to revolutionise kidney disease treatment by enabling us to study disease and test drug safety and effectiveness. This is done by showing if a drug is toxic to the kidney model before giving it to the patient. In the future, we may be able to make replacement kidney tissue to support the failing kidney.

We’re also investigating the effects of COVID-19 on the kidneys, studying the genes required for normal kidney development, investigating what happens because of genetic or environmental damage during development, and researching if genomic testing (testing all a person’s genes) can improve diagnosis and management of end-stage kidney disease of unknown cause.

Impacts of our research

Doctor holding up an ultrasound of child's kidney

Impacts of our research

Our pioneering breakthrough in 2013 which involved growing a kidney model similar in maturity to a five-week-old embryo gained global scientific and media attention. It’s opened the door to exploring better treatments and growing replacement kidney tissue. The discoveries are now being used to model kidney disease by scientists worldwide.
We can scale up the number of kidney models we can grow by using a bio-printer. This speeds up our research in kidney development and disease.
We discovered a new gene linked to a kidney disorder in children and confirmed mutations in the gene are linked to nephrotic syndrome, a condition that leads to potentially life-threatening protein loss in the urine during infancy.
We create models of patients’ kidney disease, including Nephronophthisis, and can correct the gene mutation in a dish. This allows researchers to better understand how the diseases develop and paves the way towards potential treatments.
We’re part of the international research centre reNEW, which aims to develop potential new therapies using human stem cells for kidney disease and other diseases.

Our vision

We strive to give every child the opportunity for a healthy and happy future through better diagnosis, treatments and cures for kidney disease. Advancing understanding of causes and developing new interventions to improve children’s lives may also lead to new therapies for adult-onset kidney disease.