Blood signature of Progressive Diabetes Kidney Disease study
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Does an altered platelet microparticle signal in different ethnic groups induce heightened diabetic kidney disease responses?
IRAS ID
358176
Contact name
Wayne Roberts
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Leeds Beckett University
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 0 months, 5 days
Research summary
This application is for approval to gain a blood sample from diabetic or diabetic kidney disease patients from white and south Asian ethnic background patients recruited by our clinical collaborator Dr Sunil Daga at his renal clinic. Healthy participants, to act as a control group, will be recruited from Leeds Beckett University. We have funding from the charity Kidney Research Yorkshire to support a three year PhD research project entitled ‘Does an altered platelet microparticle signal in different ethnic groups induce heightened diabetic kidney disease (DKD) responses?’.
DKD patients from South Asian backgrounds have poorer outcomes, occurring earlier and progresses faster than White Caucasian individuals. In patients with DKD, platelet blood cells release increased levels of small particles (microparticles) that contain specialised chemicals (miRNAs) which may promote disease responses. This project will extract microparticles from blood of healthy and patients with DKD or diabetes only (from different ethnic backgrounds) to study the microparticle count and content. We will identify if there is an altered microparticle signature in different patient groups. We will then take a computational approach to model and predict how different microparticle content is likely to impact on disease progression. Finally we will validate these findings in the lab by incubating microparticles from our different study groups on kidney cells grown in the lab to determine their impact on kidney disease responses. This will provide a first proof of principle that PMPs directly induce differential DKD and ethnicity-associated responses
REC name
East Midlands - Nottingham 2 Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
26/EM/0021
Date of REC Opinion
5 Feb 2026
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion