Publications from the TRIDENT consortium, from the study design to tissue-based findings. Each entry states the question, what was found and why it matters, with a link to the paper.
Spatial transcriptomics across the TRIDENT biopsies resolves the cellular neighborhoods of diabetic kidney disease and identifies a subgroup of patients defined by B cell-rich infiltrates, a biologically distinct form of the disease that clinical classification could not see.
doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10363-4Quantitative pathology across the cohort shows where the standard classification of advanced diabetic nephropathy fails to predict outcome and proposes a scheme that does.
doi:10.1016/j.kint.2026.07.028The largest systematic account of biopsy complications in patients with diabetes, the evidence base for every tissue-anchored study that follows.
doi:10.2215/CJN.0000001083Self-supervised deep learning on biopsy images uncovers reproducible, prognostically meaningful injury patterns that human scoring does not capture reliably: the foundation for objective, scalable digital pathology in diabetic kidney disease.
doi:10.1038/s41598-025-19193-2CureGN and TRIDENT together establish rigorously phenotyped comparator cohorts that integrate retrospective and prospective clinical data with patient-reported outcomes, enabling cross-disease comparisons at scale.
doi:10.1159/000531679Specific patterns of glomerular epithelial injury associate strongly with kidney function decline in biopsy-confirmed disease. Diabetic kidney disease is heterogeneous, and histology still matters when it is analyzed quantitatively.
doi:10.1016/j.ekir.2021.01.025Single-cell RNA sequencing of urine captures kidney cell diversity and injury states non-invasively, opening the door to repeatable molecular monitoring without a biopsy.
doi:10.1681/ASN.2020050757Before discovery comes trust. Across multiple centers, research kidney biopsies in patients with diabetes proved safe and feasible within a rigorous protocol, enabling every tissue-based discovery that followed.
doi:10.2215/CJN.13061019The foundational paper: integrate kidney biopsies, deep clinical data, molecular profiling and longitudinal follow-up to understand diabetic kidney disease at a mechanistic level. Everything that followed traces back to this design.
doi:10.1016/j.kint.2019.09.020Manuscripts using TRIDENT data are circulated to the consortium before submission and acknowledge TRIDENT and its funders. Investigators who wish to propose an analysis will find the process on the researchers page.
