Dr Bettina Wilm together with Dr Stephen McWilliam and colleagues at the University of Liverpool and Alder Hey Children’s Hospital have been awarded a PhD studentship generously funded by Alder Hey Children’s Kidney Fund. The award of £90,000 will fund a PhD student over 3 years.

The new PhD project at University of Liverpool in collaboration with Alder Hey Children’s Hospital aims to mitigate paediatric acute kidney injury and will utilise NFkB reporter cell models for preventative interventions.

The Project aims to improve our understanding of the ways in which kidneys are injured in children during medical treatment, in order to prevent or avoid this from happening.

Kidney injury can happen when children are treated with the drug vancomycin.

Kidney injury can also occur when children have to have surgery on their heart.

The team will use specific human kidney cells as model systems in our study, in order to understand more about how kidney injury is caused by either the drug or the surgery. They have found that there is a mechanistic link in the way the injury is caused and believe that the study can lead to developing better approaches to preventing the injury with new therapies.

We would like to thank all our supporters for enabling the Fund to continue funding research, as we have done since our inception in 1968.

Photo:- Dr Bettina Wilm