The Frontiers Meeting in New Delhi focused on the bidirectional relationship between infections and kidney diseases. Infections can cause both acute kidney injury (AKI) and chronic kidney disease (CKD) through a variety of mechanisms, while patients with all kidney diseases, especially those on dialysis and kidney transplant recipients, have a greatly heightened propensity to develop infections which adversely affect their long-term outcomes. This has been illustrated during the COVID-19 pandemic, which showed a high likelihood of death in those who developed AKI due to COVID and the extreme vulnerability of patients on dialysis and kidney transplant recipients.

Manifestations of disease depend on the patient’s health status/immune defense mechanisms, the micro-organism, and numerous genetic and environmental factors. There are also important geographic differences, and infections continue to be a significant causes of AKI and CKD in many countries. These are particularly accentuated in low-resource settings, where access to diagnosis and treatment is limited.

There was an urgent need to better understand the complex relationship between infections and kidney disease and develop safe and effective approaches to prevention, diagnosis and treatment at all levels of healthcare through multidisciplinary translational research and implementation. Prevention, early diagnosis and prompt treatment of infection is nephroprotective and has the potential to avert large numbers of deaths and DALYs (disability-adjusted life years) in patients with kidney disease.

For the first time, this unique meeting brought together a global panel of clinical and scientific experts in kidney health and infectious diseases – clinicians, scientists, academics, and general practitioners to share and present the latest developments to develop appropriate responses to this complex paradigm.