Resource Development Core
NIH
UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA AT BIRMINGHAM
Innovations to mitigate the global burden of acute kidney injury (AKI) require catalyzers that network investigators and provide them with resources that facilitate discovery, translation and implementation science to impact bedside care, improve policy and dismantle health inequalities. The overarching objective of the Resource Development Core is to incubate novel and strategic approaches to continuously support AKI research across a diverse universe of investigators in the O'Brien Kidney Consortium. This Core will provide a dynamic resource and platform to develop, test and refine innovations that could accelerate pre-clinical and clinical research and then can be offered as part of the Biomedical Resource Cores. The initial focus of this Core will be centered in advanced and quantitative AKI biological characterization and big data analyses. In the pre-clinical area, novel analytical approaches in metabolomics and molecular and functional in vivo imaging will be incubated to probe unique biological characteristics of disease development. In the clinical area, tools for multi-institutional Electronic Health Record (EHR) data management and harmonization and a novel federated learning platform to evaluate Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based tools will be developed. These development areas will be frequently evaluated to assure that the selected tools to be refined or developed are relevant to patients and investigators, and use the most advanced technologies to maintain high standards of validation, reproducibility and transferability tailoring the growing investigator's needs with a pathway to be offered in the Biomedical Cores in the future. To continue to drive innovations in AKI research, the following Specific Aims are proposed. In Aim 1, we will develop an incubator for novel technologies to support pre-clinical research in AKI. Specifically, in Aim 1A, we will develop tools for the examination of the disturbed distribution of small molecules and peptides in AKI. We will develop novel microfluidic methods aimed at high resolution molecular cartography in kidney tissue. In Aim 1B, we will develop molecular and functional kidney-specific imaging and image-analysis approaches in pre-clinical animal models of AKI. Probing for longitudinal evaluations of tissue- scale biological changes with translational positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) will elucidate key molecular, functional, and anatomical alterations during AKI development and in response to novel therapeutics. In Aim 2, we will develop an incubator for digital workspace technologies to support EHR data analyses in AKI. This will include enhancements in existing collaborative digital workspaces to support EHR data management and harmonization (Aim 2A) and the development of a novel federated multi- task learning platform to evaluate AI-based tools (Aim 2B). These aims are forward-thinking to enable novel methodologies to better understand the pathobiology and heterogeneity of AKI. Project Narrative As per the RFA, not needed for individual components.
Research Centers