Pioneering kidney disease research
Dr Brendon Neuen is Director of the Kidney Trials Unit at Royal North Shore Hospital who is driving clinical trials to improve patient outcomes.
His research focuses on identifying new treatments for patients with kidney disease, tackling the dual risk of kidney failure and cardiovascular disease. He collaborates with medical institutes and universities, as well as with the pharmaceutical industry to conduct large international randomised clinical trials. Trained as a nephrologist in Sydney, Brendon further honed his clinical trials expertise with a Masters, PhD and postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford, UNSW Sydney, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. What fuels his passion for trials? “Clinical trials are the best way to improve the health of millions of people worldwide by better understanding what works and what doesn’t in healthcare settings,” he says. “I really enjoy the challenge of being a clinician and triallist. You have to have in-depth understanding of the science and how to conduct a clinical trial. But you also need to be excellent operationally in terms of logistics and often working with hundreds of sites across 20 or 30 countries. Finally, you must be able to lead large groups of people and bring them with you over the course of a trial which can takes several years.” “The reward is if you can do that, you can make a huge impact on patient care because what changes guidelines and what changes people’s treatments are clinical trials.”
Since 2022, Brendon established and has led SMART-C, a global consortium pooling all the available clinical trial data for sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 (SGLT2) inhibitors, a drug used for treating type 2 diabetes, heart failure and chronic kidney disease. The consortium includes data on over 90,000 patients enrolled in 13 global clinical trials. This public-private partnership involves more than 12 institutions including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Oxford and Sydney Universities, and others in Europe, as well as major pharmaceutical companies. While the drug class was known to have cardiovascular benefits, Brendon’s work has definitively shown that the SGLT2 inhibitors reduce kidney disease progression, even in people without diabetes, and that the drug class has particularly prominent benefits in preventing heart failure and sudden cardiac death.
Dr Brendon Neuen
10 Tomorrow’s medicine today
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