Fresenius Seeks to Enroll 100,000 in Kidney Disease Genomic Registry

Kidney care company Fresenius Medical Care has launched a campaign to promote patient enrollment in the company's kidney-focused genomics registry, which was first introduced last year.

With the goal of enrolling more than 100,000 participants within five years, the My Reason campaign will help build the registry into one of the largest of its kind by making participation a standard offering to patients in Fresenius Kidney Care dialysis centers in the United States. The data collected by My Reason will serve as a research tool linking genomic and clinical data of chronic kidney disease (CKD) and end stage kidney disease (ESKD) participants, helping scientists better understand genetic variations in patients. The hope is that this research will lead to more precise diagnoses and therapies that improve outcomes by individualizing care.

"My Reason will help us build a groundbreaking registry of people with advanced kidney disease from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds," said Franklin Maddux, M.D., global chief medical officer of Fresenius Medical Care, in a statement. "Pulled from such a large population of patients, when paired with existing clinical data, this data set at scale will help scientists untangle the complex interactions that lead to kidney injury and use genetic sequencing to better understand pathways of injury in kidney disease."

Both patients and their family members residing in the United States are eligible to participate in the My Reason campaign that launched at the beginning of April.

Fresenius Medical Care provides dialysis treatments to about 350,000 patients around the globe. This renal-focused genomic registry was opened in select Fresenius Kidney Care dialysis centers in January 2021. As part of its growth strategy, Fresenius Medical Care is using digital technologies and has the capability to analyze huge amounts of data to develop new forms of renal therapy and collaborate with computational experts in the genetic understanding of kidney disease.

Nephrology has been under-represented in clinical research, even as rapid progress in gene sequencing and analysis has led to advances in precision medicine and individualized care in oncology, cardiology, and other medical areas. The Fresenius Global Medical Office developed the registry to help researchers unlock new genomic insights, filling a gap in large-scale phenotypic and genotypic data that had been identified as a critical need.