Guidelines recommend regular monitoring of renal excretory function in T2DM by a laboratory parameter called “eGFR”. Of note, not all patients with T2DM develop DKD, and those who do loose eGFR with a remarkable inter-, but also intra-individual variability over many years. This is due to the complex interaction of genetic predisposition and environmental factors that results in a personalized trajectory of development and progression of DKD.

Formally DKD evolves as a sequence of pathophysiological states being causally linked by action-reaction. Certain trajectories resemble a fast decline of eGFR while others result in a fairly stable situation. Inter-individual heterogeneity is further complicated by intra-individual variability. Some states may result in stable or even improving renal function, others in rapid decline and some may see rapid transition while others are stable for years. A state is defined by its underlying pathophysiology, and we have to keep in mind that this is the point of action of drugs. Therefore drugs exhibit beneficial effects only in certain states, while they fail in others. When applying such a state model we can capture inter-, but also intra-individual variance in drug response.

DC-ren follows the concept of individualized trajectories of state transitions with state-specific drug response according to underlying pathophysiology. Such a setting is conceptually well established in the scientific domain of dynamical systems research.

The translational focus of DC-ren is to establish and validate a decision support software application for optimizing combination drug therapy in patients with DKD on a personalized level in a “technology readiness level 6” prototype (i.e. allowing practical demonstration in a relevant environment).

For implementation a validation study, leveraging on existing clinical trial repositories and realized as a “virtual trial”, will test if technology-mediated decisions add in precision in personalized drug response prediction when compared to present clinical guidelines. This validation is pivotal for moving the decision support solution in higher technology readiness levels, and ultimately in clinical settings.

On top, we test the decision support solution in two relevant application scenarios, namely in DKD drug R&D and compound recovery:

Contemporary clinical research critically depends on interdisciplinary teams, and DC-ren balances theoretical, experimental and clinical expertise. The DC-ren analytical concept routes in applied Category Theory, a framework providing concepts and tools for modeling dynamical systems. Its specific strength is the representation of composite function, in DC-ren being distinct DKD pathologies at interference with drug mechanism of action. Translating the concept via combining statistics and simulation on the basis of a rich clinical and molecular data space allows taking a novel perspective for assessing personalized drug response as hybrid AI solution. We leverage on extensive biobanks and clinical data repositories readily capturing personalized response to various drugs approved for DKD.

We complement clinical phenotyping with top-level molecular profiling, going for multiplexed assays and proteomics. This will provide us with a targeted data matrix for capturing disease mechanisms and drug impact at the effector level of molecular processes: A System-of-Systems. All analytical and experimental work is embedded in strong clinical research for assuring technology development right in focus of patient needs. Practical implementation follows agile software development tailored at reaching a prototype decision support platform, finally evaluated in dedicated validation and DKD drug application studies. With this setting DC-ren bridges from a novel concept to a clinical solution with substantial technology readiness level.