University Hospital of Cologne

Division of Pediatric Nephrology, Immunology and Hypertension
Kerpener Str. 62
50937 Köln, Germany

The Department

The Division of Pediatric Nephrology is among the largest services for children's kidney diseases in Germany with an encatchment of 4-5 million population and more than 4000 outpatient contacts and 1000 hospitalizations per year. Our multidisciplinary team offers full medical and psychosocial and dietary services for children of all ages, including a prenatal consultation clinic. Our group has a special clinical focus on pediatric chronic and end-stage renal disease, treating more than 300 children in the pre-dialysis stage, on dialysis and after kidney transplantation in our state of the art facilities.

Further special interest comprises genetic kidney diseases with a nephrogenetic focus in the institute of human genetics, nephrotic syndrome und ciliopathies. A number of international clinical and translational studies on these topics are organized by our group. We participate in numerous registries and quality assurance programs and are the coordinators of the pediatric part of the national program “Quality in Nephrology” (QiNKid) of the “Kuratorium für Dialyse und Nierentransplantation e.V. (KfH)”.

Also, we provide the full spectrum of acute renal replacement therapies from neonatal to adolescent age, with around 1300 inpatient treatments per year. Further specialization targets all kinds of apheresis therapy, including indications in rare metabolic diseases, for example lipid apheresis in homozygous hypercholesterolemia. The Division of Pediatric Nephrology is an integral part of the Cologne Transplant Center, where an average of 10 renal transplantations in children and adolescents are performed every year.

The Division is also one of the most active research sites on pediatric kidney diseases in Europe with a strong translational interest. Covering a wide range of areas of expertise team members are applying and coordinating state-of-the-art scientific approaches ranging from molecular cell biology through preclinical experimental and observational clinical studies all the way to randomized clinical trials. In addition to the clinical research of the ESCAPE network the division is actively involved in multiple additional research institutions and consortia including the Center for Molecular Medicine Cologne, the Cluster of Excellence – Cellular Stress Responses in Aging-Associated Diseases, the European Reference Network on Rare Kidney Diseases, the DFG research group on podocyte-associated diseases, and the NEOCYST consortium on early onset cystic kidney diseases. This research is funded e.g. by multiple scientific societies, by the German Research Council, and by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research.