The Metabolomics Australia node at The University of Melbourne is partnering with Dr John Wentworth from the Walter Eliza Hall Institute to identify novel biomarkers for early stage diagnosis of diabetic kidney disease to provide more effective treatment options.

A long standing diabetic condition often leads to kidney disease especially when sugar blood levels are badly managed. Kidney disease is expensive to treat and often leads to early death.  While diabetic kidney disease can be diagnosed using a number of clinical markers established for blood and urine, all are non-specific and do not correlate with disease onset or progression. The current tests are important for medical intervention aimed at slowing kidney disease, however most people still suffer kidney failure as irreversible damage has already occurred.

The research will centre on the urine samples of 60 diabetic patients collected over ten years. Half the patients have developed nephropathy allowing critical metabolic comparisons between the two cohorts.  Once metabolic markers are identified and validated, the next phase of the project will seek collaboration with Proteomics and Genomics Australia to explore complementary markers for instance peptides, proteins or small RNA fragments.

The generous financial support of the Cass Foundation will allow a broad range of complementary analytical platforms to be employed.  Metabolomic techniques such as gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) will be used for untargeted screening and quantitative metabolite analyses will utilise LC-MS and NMR to measure, quantify and compare thousands of small molecules.  Metabolomics Australia will provide the sophisticated bioinformatics support required for statistical analysis and expert capabilities in multivariant analysis to develop mathematical models for identifying potential metabolic markers.