Kidney Cancer Research Your Donations Have Made Possible or Projects you are Currently Funding

Pilot Project in Genomics and Pathomics to predict the prognosis of patients with kidney cancer

Dr.. Paari Murugan was awarded a Climb 4 kidney cancer research pilot grant in 2023 for work utilizing a multiomics approach to predict kidney cancer oiutcomes. He is taking a digital photo of H&E stained pathology slides for the KiTS cohort which we hope to add as well as preparing slides for gene expression profiling. These new added pieces of information will continue make the KiTS cohort one of the most valuable kidney cancer research resources in the world.

Kidney DNA adductomics

Your funding led to Researchers from Cleveland Clinic and the University of Minnesota to get an NIH grant looking and the environmental causes of kidney cancer. Researchers including Dr. Robert Turesky, Dr. Silvia Balbo and Dr. Christopher Weight hope to uncover which pathogens can cause DNA damage in the kidneys of kidney cancer patients, hoping to find the molecular links between diet, environmental exposures, smoking and kidney cancer.

Pathomics to predict the prognosis of patients with kidney cancer

Climb for Kidney Cancer made a pilot donation to the Center of Computational Imaging and Personalized Diagnostics at Case Western Reserve University with Dr. Anant Madabhushi. Through this grant we hope to spur the use of AI Computer Vision to predict prognosis from the H&E stain pathologic slides. This will help provide pilot data for a larger peer reviewed grant, thus leveraging your donations to Climb4KC.

International AI Challenge to predict aggressive kidney cancer on CT imaging, in conjunction with IBM-Knight Challenge 2022 with ISBI conference

Crowdsourcing Kidney Cancer Deep Learning KiTS19, KiTS21 and KiTS23

Since 2019 your donations have helped to fund international kidney cancer challenges. we’ve hosted many international AI kidney cancer challenges. We’ve segmented 100,000 CT images from Kidney Cancer patients and this has helped to establish the state of art kidney segmentation.

Kidney Cancer Research Scholarships

This will be the fourth year of offering these summer research fellowships.  Because of the success we’ve had over the past several years, we had nearly 30 Climb 4 Kidney Cancer Scholars.  These scholarships will be used to attract some of the best and brightest minds to spend the summer carrying out kidney cancer research.  We hope to inspire these students to choose a career where they can help kidney cancer patients.  Funds are used to provide a modest stipend, additional funds will be used for equipment necessary to carry out their research, computers, statistical and IT support, and funds to present their findings at national and international meetings such as the American Urological Association Annual Meeting, Society for Urologic Oncology and the GUASCO cancer symposium. Meet the Past Scholars.

Our past challenge helped to coordinate around 260,000 hours of kidney cancer research all around the world!

Our team was recognized as the top challenge in 2019 attracting the highest number of participants for a 3D segmentation challenge ever, and having the most submissions ever to a challenge!  Your donations led to the coordination of 260,000+ hours of kidney cancer research!  Our research was also honored as the top paper in the imaging section of the EAU annual meeting in Barcelona, Spain 2019, Top paper in the AUA annual meeting in 2022 and again in 2023

Listen to Dr. Weight being interviewed for BJU International about artificial intelligence, based on the research funded by your generous donations to Climb 4 Kidney Cancer by Clicking Here.

3D Printed Kidney Cancer Models for Surgical Planning and Education

We created one of the world’s first 3D printed kidney tumor models for simulated kidney cancer surgery on the Da Vinci Robot.  We developed a realistic kidney model with a tumor and 10 surgeons performed a simulated Kidney Cancer surgery.  When we develop this technology to be high fidelity and patient-specific we can create a realistic model that the surgeon could practice the surgery prior to doing the real one.  Now we’re working to improve the model with more lifelike materials as well as generating virtual reality models.

3D Printed Kidney with Tumor from CT Scan for Surgical Simulation U of Minnesota 2019

Gene Therapy

We need funding for a clinical trial of an exciting new gene therapy that has shown surprising success in a mouse model. This therapy has been shown to be safe in the phase 1 human model and the next step is to try it on a limited number of patients with kidney cancer.

Kidney Cancer Patient Education Tools

We have been working on a patient education application for patients with kidney cancer to be used on a tablet or phone.  This can replace hard to interpret doctors’ drawings, fuzzy ultrasounds, etc with images of kidneys and tumors corresponding with patient’s tumors that they can manipulate and understand the anatomy of the kidney and cancer and understand the potential complications of treatment.  Here is a mock-up of several possibilities, but we currently lack funding to finish the project.

Why Donate?

Kidney Cancer and Lack of Funding

Kidney Cancer is severely underfunded compared to other cancers.  Though kidney cancer falls in the top ten most common cancers, there has not been the same level of advocacy for kidney cancer compared to other top cancers like Breast, Prostate, Colon, and Lung.  We’re trying to fix that.

How to Help

Donate directly today. Your donation will be made to Team8. Climb 4 Kidney Cancer is a division of Team8, a 501-c non-profit dedicated to raising money for kidney cancer research. Learn more about us.