GeGe4Nephro project supports kidney transplantation

There are gender-specific risks after a kidney transplant. The GeGe4Nephro research project, led by Dr. Matthieu-P. Schapranow from the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering, is dedicated to addressing these differences in order to improve medical care for transplant patients. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMFTR) is funding the project for an initial period of three years with around €1.5 million as part of the funding guideline "Interactive Technologies for Gender-Specific Health" (GeGe).

 

In Germany, around 100,000 people live with chronic kidney disease and require regular dialysis and, in the long term, an organ transplant. Their care accounts for more than 10 percent of healthcare expenditure. Kidney transplant recipients have an increased risk of cancer compared to the general population. Gender-specific differences in diagnosis, therapy, and aftercare are still not sufficiently taken into account. For example, women have up to a 20 percent lower chance of getting on the waiting list for a donor kidney, despite having a comparable or better prognosis after transplantation than men. 

The goal of GeGe4Nephro is to develop an AI-supported prognosis model that helps physicians better assess the individual risk of complications after a kidney transplant, such as cancer, and to responsibly implement personalized preventive measures, such as targeted skin cancer screenings. To this end, an interactive demonstrator is being developed with ethical considerations in mind, enabling physicians to analyze serious transplant risks individually for each patient in real time. This will then be tested in everyday clinical practice and, in the long term, transferred into routine care. 

The GeGe4Nephro consortium combines all relevant expertise for this purpose. The Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (CHA) and the Universitätsklinikum Leipzig (UKL) are contributing clinical expertise and transplant data, the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) is responsible for ethical guidelines, and the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering (HPI) is contributing AI methodological expertise. Justus Liebig University Giessen (JLU) and Labor Pachmann GmbH contribute state-of-the-art epi/genetic and molecular laboratory expertise. In addition, the consortium has a network of international partners consisting of patient and physician representatives, transplant centers, research, and industry. 

The HPI, with its Digital Health Cluster, is primarily responsible for the work on the gender-specific, clinical AI prognosis model. Research in the interdisciplinary Digital Health Cluster follows a patient-centered and data-driven approach. The goal is to use digital technologies in the fields of medicine, healthcare, and public health to continuously improve healthcare. 

GeGe4Nephro is an innovative tool for gender-specific, data-based medicine that sustainably optimizes the follow-up care of kidney transplant patients. 

 

 

 

Citation:Hasso Plattner Institut

 

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