Pre-Congress Program

This course covers the principles and practicalities of designing and conducting randomized clinical trials. It will provide an overview of the trial creation process from concept to protocol, including practical advice on when and how to engage consumers. The course will feature an overview of the fundamental features of the classical trial, including design, conduct and reporting. It will also discuss innovative trial designs with a particular focus on their relevance to evidence generation in nephrology. Participants will be introduced to statistical principles for classical and innovative trial designs. The course provides an introduction to trial design and delivery and will equip participants to critically assess randomized trials.

This course will demonstrate how to increase the number of kidney transplant surgeries in high-risk populations such as the aging population and HLA or ABO-incompatible pairs. To enhance new knowledge and techniques on treatments that make kidney transplants last longer, the course will demonstrate a new predictive model for improved allograft survival, the pathogenesis of chronic allograft dysfunction, and the non-invasive monitoring of kidney allograft rejection. There will be an update on current knowledge of viral infections in kidney transplant recipients. The impact and management of viral infections such as COVID-19, BK virus, Adenovirus, and CMV infection on patients and allograft outcomes will also be addressed.

The Interventional Nephrology Course is designed for nephrology physicians and associated healthcare providers. It offers a unique hands-on opportunity to learn the fundamentals as well as elements of state-of-the-art dialysis access care. The course covers a broad spectrum of procedures required for dialysis access care, including HD and PD catheter procedures, kidney biopsy, endovascular procedures and point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS).
The session on access procedures will give participants experience in HD and PD catheter placement and kidney biopsy. The AV access sessions include physical examinations and practice of endovascular procedures, including angioplasty, thrombectomy and stent placement. POCUS has emerged as an essential tool for bedside diagnostic evaluation in clinical practice; the session will teach the use of POCUS to evaluate the kidney, bladder, vascular access, and volume status in CKD patients. Prominent world experts present the course and will be present for Q&A sessions on each topic.

The Nursing, Nutrition, and Allied Health Professionals Symposium will focus on collaborative kidney care to improve patient safety and treatment efficacy, and the challenges of incorporating patient voices in nephrology.
The Symposium program covers topics that matter, ranging from patient-centered aspects in collaborative kidney care, performance measures and quality improvement tools, shared-decision counseling, global kidney nutrition care, bridging gaps and streamlining renal nutrition care. We will focus on improving renal dietitian training with relevance for low-resource settings. A specific review will be given on dietary prescriptions for patients with CKD. A symposium not to be missed!

This course will demonstrate the importance of big data and open science in kidney health, review and introduce the openly accessible big data source for the kidney research community, and showcase, in a hands-on setting, how to access and leverage these resources to support kidney discovery research.

The course will also initiate a panel discussion, joined by experts in this field, on challenges we are facing and opportunities to cooperatively working on big data in kidney discovery research.

Participants will learn the importance and how to access, mine, and analyze large data for novel hypothesis generation and validation of your own discoveries. No prior bioinformatic knowledge is required for this course.

Pathological examination of renal biopsy plays an important role in the diagnosis and management of medical renal diseases, providing prognostic information and aiding in therapeutic decision-making. The renal pathology course offers an in-depth update on the pathology of various kidney diseases, including kidney transplants. The course also describes recent insights into the pathophysiologic aspects of diseases and discusses novel cross-cutting technologies that transform nephropathology research, diagnostics and data mining of kidney tissue. The clinicopathological conference will tackle selected cases showing distinctive renal biopsy findings instructive toward a definitive diagnosis. The speakers are renal pathologists and nephrologists from around the world who are recognized leaders in their fields.