Kidney research is challenging and breakthroughs come through many years of investigation by numerous highly skilled and dedicated scientists. That’s why we fund the best renal researcher professionals in the UK, at all stages in their careers paths.
High quality research is the starting point that allows us to understand the basic mechanisms of kidney disease. This enables the development of new treatments and prevention. Our main approach to research is to support a broad range of projects that offer the best opportunities of success.
Our Fellowship grants programme is funded as follows:
Details of all the different grant types
An overview of our research work
Watch a video of Professor Neil Turner, Chairman of Kidney Research UK, explain the work being conducted by many of our researchers and his vision of the future.
The Funding Gap
The reality of funding kidney research is that presently the charity can only fund 1 in 3 grant applications. Our target is to be able to fund 2 in 3 grant applications, within the next 2 years, whilst still maintaining the highest quality research standards.
This will greatly improve our chances and shorten the time to finding medical ‘breakthroughs’ for kidney disease, helping many thousands of kidney disease patients and save many lives.
For this we need to raise an extra £500,000 in 2010
Our dilema is which researchers should we not fund?
Funding research success
Our commitment to kidney research in the UK takes on many journeys of discovery and innovation through our Fellowships.
A prime example is a visionary research programme that could allow patients to keep and maintain the use of their kidneys. Dr. David Kluth and his research group at Edinburgh University have been studying the Macrophage, which are human white blood cells.
He believes that he can programme these immune cells to repair kidney scarring and inflammation, which can often cause kidney failure, with the benefit of improving the success of renal transplantations.
Dr Kluth and his research team have completed the final stage of their studies which now need to progress to clinical trials.
This is just one example of our approach to the investment of more than £1million into one visionary research programme, over almost a decade from 2001.
Watch a video of Dr Kluth talking about his work
