NEWSLETTER ::: NO. 22 ::: NOV 2021 THE POWER OF COMBINING EXPERIMENTAL AND COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES The ultimate goal of computational kidney models is to someday enable personalized therapies for patients with kidney disease. Current models seek to elucidate fundamental mechanisms and signaling cascades, to investigate the impact of gain- or loss-of-function mutations, to provide an integrated understanding of multi-level systems, and to predict the impact of drugs and other therapeutic interventions. To these ends, modelers require large amounts of well-designed experimental and clinical data, and the increasing availability of RNA-Seq, proteomics and metabolomics data should accelerate their efforts. More importantly, modelers must work in close collaboration with experimentalists and clinicians, who play essential roles in identifying key gaps in knowledge, guiding the choice of hypotheses to be tested, and critically assessing model limitations – all of which are indispensable to broaden the relevance and impact of in silico explorations. Modelers have long sought multidisciplinary advice, but until recently few “on the other side” were convinced of the utility of renal computational physiopathology. This gap is dwindling, however, thanks in part to he omics revolution. Expanding awareness of the ability of models to explain how disease-related structural changes affect renal function, or to dissect the complex effects of drug therapies, to cite a few examples, has created more and more converts. Increasing recognition of the power of combining experimental and computational approaches can only bode well for the successful development of targeted treatments for kidney disease. Aurelie Edwards Research Professor, Boston University   NCCR Kidney.CH Institute of Anatomy University of Zurich Winterthurerstrasse 190 8057 Zurich | Switzerland www.nccr-kidney.ch katharina.thomas@uzh.ch Kidney - Control of Homeostasis is a Swiss research initiative, headquartered at University of Zurich, which brings together leading specialists in experimental and clinical nephrology and physiology from the universities of Bern, Fribourg, Geneva, Lausanne, and Zurich, and corresponding university hospitals.