University of Southern Denmark

<p><strong>Overview:</strong></p>
<p>The University of Southern Denmark welcomed the first students onto the campus in Odense in September 1966, and things have been developing by leaps and bounds ever since. SDU now have five faculties with more than 32,000 students, almost 20% of whom are from abroad, and more than 4,000 employees distributed across our main campus in Odense and regional campuses in Slagelse, Kolding, Esbjerg and Sønderborg.</p>
<p>SDU conducts world-class research and are one of the top fifty young universities in the world. Every day more than 2,000 researchers and 32,000 students build on the university’s reputation as a centre of academic excellence.</p>
<p><strong>Research:</strong></p>
<p>The University of Southern Denmark consists of five faculties:</p>
<ul>
<li>Faculty of Engineering</li>
<li>Faculty of Health Sciences</li>
<li>Faculty of Science</li>
<li>Faculty of Business and Social Sciences</li>
<li>Faculty of Humanities</li>
</ul>
<p>Every faculty consists of several departments, where the departments have a noticeable academic and economic independence and responsibility. Together departments and centres cover a wide range of research fields and educational opportunities.</p>
<p><strong>Industry Partnerships:</strong></p>
<p>SDU works purposefully to create dialogue between the university’s researchers and the surrounding society. To promote and make communication and knowledge exchange visible, faculties cooperate with various external parties. These activities are organised in centres. The centres serve to promote special purposes in research, education or knowledge exchange.</p>
<p>SDU RIO (SDU Research &amp; Innovation Organisation) supports collaboration between research, education, the business community and the public sector.</p>


<h1 id="background">Background</h1>
<ul>
<li>Acute kidney injury (AKI) is associated with high healthcare costs and patient mortality.</li>
<li>Early detection of kidney damage is crucial for optimal treatment, but kidney damage is silent, i.e. kidney function is maintained until 50% kidney damage.</li>
<li>Current clinical markers reflect kidney function, e.g. blood creatinine levels and urine output, and are insensitive and slow to change after damage.</li>
<li>Valuable time is therefore lost, delaying treatment onset and increases the patients risk of permanent loss of kidney function.</li>
</ul>
<h1 id="technology-overview">Technology Overview</h1>
<p>Acute kidney injury (AKI) affects ~20% of hospitalized patients, though doctors fail to initiate the correct treatment. Faster, accurate clinical detection of kidney damage is urgently needed.</p>
<p>Diagnosis today is insensitive and slow to change relative to AKI, so time is lost and treatment is delayed. This increases patient risk of permanent loss of kidney function.This AKI diagnostic provides medical doctors an earlier window of opportunity to proactively assess kidney damage severity and mitigate the severe consequences of AKI and other kidney injuries</p>
<p>The inventing team has developed two monoclonal antibodies which bind to our biomarker aquaporin-2 (AQ‑2) on the surface of urinary exosomes. This enables fast and sensitive test (ELISA) for detection of uEV levels necessary to screen patients from urine samples.</p>
<p>Their biomarker can ‑within 12 hours of transplantation -discriminate between worse (DGF, delayed graft function) and good (IGF, immediate graft function) outcome, and is directly correlated to kidney damage severity. The biomarker is excreted in unique transport vesicles (exosomes) when the kidney is damaged and can be measured in a simple urine sample (exosomes are released from kidney cells immediately).</p>
<p>By evaluating kidney transplant recipients for delayed graft function, our inventors have shown that elevated levels of our biomarker represent cellular damage in the allograft that leads to clinically apparent delayed graft function. Detection of this biomarker has a high sensitivity and specificity, i.e. it accurately predicts which patients will experience DGF.</p>
<h1 id="benefits">Benefits</h1>
<ul>
<li>This point-of-care diagnostic will save lives, improve patient quality of life, and reduce healthcare costs.</li>
<li>This AKI diagnostic will enable healthcare professionals to make better + more timely clinical decisions and create personalised treatments for patients with AKI.</li>
<li>Biomarker is specific, it is solely expressed in a part of the kidney that is relevant for detecting kidney damage. The biomarker is a key transport protein, i.e. a critical component of the kidney’s pathophysiology</li>
<li>Biomarker presence in urine reflects a graded, dose-dependent response to damage.</li>
<li>Biomarker level returns to normal when injury ceases</li>
<li>Very fast detection of kidney damage, because our biomarker is a pre-formed protein and therefore does not require de-novo expression like e.g. NGAL, KIM-1 and calprotectin</li>
</ul>
<h1 id="applications">Applications</h1>
<p>The market size for predictive biomarkers detecting early kidney damage is substantial. Approximately 1 in 5 adults is affected by AKI during hospitalization and 2 million people die of AKI every year.</p>
<p>The primary market is for detection of acute kidney injury after nephrectomy.</p>
<h1 id="opportunity">Opportunity</h1>
<p>SDU seeks out-licensing of this asset for furthercommercialdevelopment of the kidney biomarkerprogram. </p>
<p>IP rights include a priority patent application held by SDU (University of SouthernDenmark) and RSD (Region of SouthernDenmark. Priority application filed March 2023.</p>
<p>SDU are currently looking for funding, collaborators and partners to validate our findings from kidney transplant patients in high-value markets such as acute kidney injury (AKI), diabetes, hypertension and clinical trials (drug development) </p>
