Elevating the Patient Voice Across R&D to Address Heart and Kidney Disease
I was invited by the Heart & Kidney Care Alliance, a Bayer-funded but fully patient-led initiative, to participate in a panel discussion at the 2025 Global Summit on Kidney Disease Innovation. We discussed what it takes to elevate the patient voice across research and development in heart and kidney disease.
What were the key learnings?
The Heart & Kidney Care Alliance is a Bayer-funded but patient-led initiative that brings together more than 22 patient organisations globally. This session put two of its chairs on stage: Uroš Bogdanović, a board member of IDF Europe, and Marc Bains, a co-founder of HeartLife. Colin Prout and I joined them from Bayer.
AAKP billed the 2025 summit as the midpoint reckoning of its Decade of the Kidney, 2020 to 2030: a decade spent raising the burden of kidney disease with communities, workforces and governments, and pushing past the status quo of downstream care towards patient choice, therapies that stop kidney disease before failure, and better access to donated organs and new devices. Our session’s brief sat inside that argument: a unified approach, with patients in the room, to how heart disease and kidney disease are researched and developed for.
