News Releases

Kanazawa University

Toshiba Corporation

Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation

Tokyo/Kanazawa—Kanazawa University (hereinafter “KU”), Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502) and Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation (hereinafter “TDSL”) have initiated a joint research project that will apply advanced AI to treating diabetic nephropathy, the loss of kidney function resulting from diabetes, with the goal of clarifying the stages of its development and improving treatment.

 

Diabetes has numerous side effects, including kidney disease. High levels of blood glucose can damage the filtering ability of the kidneys, a debilitating condition that hits quality of life and is potentially fatal. It is also a condition particularly widespread in Japan, which is second only to Taiwan in the rate of patients receiving dialysis, clinical filtering that cleanses blood. Today, one in 380 Japanese is undergoing dialysis, approximately 330,000 people, and in 40% of cases the cause of the problem is aggravated diabetic nephropathy^.*1

 

Dialysis not only impacts on patient wellbeing, it is expensive to treat, at approximately $50 thousand a year per patient—an annual public medical cost of $16 billion. Treating serious diabetic nephropathy aggravation will not only extend healthy life expectancy but also improve health insurance finances.

 

KU, Toshiba and TDSL are taking on the disease with the goal of improving understanding of its mechanisms and improving treatment and quality of life for the people it hits.

 

Headed by Professor Takashi Wada, KU’s Department of Nephrology and Laboratory Medicine has world-class expertise in renal disease that will be combined with TDSL’s advanced Analytics AI SATLYS™. Developed through analysis of the vast amounts of data generated by Toshiba's diverse manufacturing operations, SATLYS™ can be applied to all kinds of real-world activities and problems, and delivers high-precision identification, prediction, factor estimation, abnormality detection, failure sign detection and behavior estimation^.*2

 

The project will use clinical know-how and the results of renal biopsies^*3 provided by Professor Wada and his team in combination with SATLYS™, and investigate the progress of diabetic nephropathy. The goal is to develop an approach that recognizes multiple patterns in the disease, and that allows patients to be stratified and systematized according to the disease’s progress. This is expected to facilitate early diagnosis and optimized treatment that aims to prevent the disease and delay its progress. The project will also offer long term follow-up that contributes to improved quality of life for patients.

 

Under the Toshiba Next Plan, announced in November 2018, Toshiba Group announced its reentry into the medical business, with an emphasis on advancing precision medicine that secures the very early detection and diagnosis of disease and more effective personalized treatment. The joint project with KU advances these goals.

 

     Graph: development of preventive methods on this research

 

###

 

Notes:

*1 Source: "Current Status of Chronic Dialysis Therapy in Japan"

       https://docs.jsdt.or.jp/overview/index.html).

*2  For more on SATLYS™ visit https://www.toshiba-sol.co.jp/pro/satlys/.

*3  Renal biopsy is the icroscopic examination to tiny samples of kidney tissue to secure an accurate diagnosis of kidney diseases such as proteinuria, hematuria, and decreased renal function, and to determine appropriate treatment.

SATLYS™ is a registered trademark or trademark of TDSL in Japan and other countries.

Other company names and product names mentioned in this document may be used as trademarks or registered trademarks by their respective owners.