Program

 

Click HERE for the full scientific program. 

 

The ISN Forefronts in Nephrology Symposia series is fundamentally designed to advance scientific nephrology in pace with programs in clinical nephrology. Through highly interactive symposia, scientific knowledge is exchanged and advanced by intermingling nephrologists with non-nephrologists from interrelated disciplines as well as basic and clinical scientists.

 

Therefore, ISN Forefronts Symposia are deliberately limited in scope to allow for high levels of interaction, deep dialogue plenty of time for focused exchange. Each symposium aims to attract no more than 100 – 150 active scientists.

 

This Forefronts Symposium will focus on the Genetic Basis of Renal Disease.

Sequencing of the human genome and of the genomes of many model organisms have revolutionized our understanding of etiology, pathogenesis, and clinical practice of chronic kidney diseases.

Identification of hundreds of single-gene causes of kidney diseases elucidate disease mechanisms, which are beginning to coalesce into pathogenic pathways, e.g. in the renal "ciliopathies".

High-throughput sequencing approaches recently revealed that a surprisingly high percentage of diseases are caused by single gene defects, e.g. in nephrotic syndrome, making unequivocal molecular genetic diagnostics accessible to patients.

Furthermore, single-gene causes of disease  may rapidly be transferred into high-throughput animal models, e.g. in zebrafish, allowing to screen for drugs that may treat or prevent these chronic kidney diseases, for which not curative treatment exists so far.

Finally, genome-wide association studies have begun to identify risk alleles for chronic kidney diseases, for instance APO1L in focal segmental glomerulosclerosis.

Understanding the genetic mechanisms and harnessing the related rapidly evolving genetic techniques to generate new mechanistic and clinical insights will be instrumental to elucidate disease mechanisms of chronic kidney diseases, most of which are still not well understood.

This Forefronts Symposium will showcase for basic and clinician scientists the most recent developments in genetic approaches to chronic kidney disease.

 

 

 
Click below for the program by day:

Day 1: Thursday September 11, 2014

Day 2: Friday September 12, 2014

Day 3: Saturday September 13, 2014

Day 4: Sunday September 14, 2014

Click HERE for the full scientific program.