Diabetic nephropathy (DN) is a multifactoral disease, and a large proportion of patients affected with either type 1 or type 2 diabetes develop diabetic nephropathy and progress to end stage renal disease (ESRD). When poor prognostic factors such as hypertension and chronic hyperglycemia are aggressively treated, the rate of progression of diabetic nephropathy can be slowed. However, no interventions have been shown to reliably halt the progression of diabetic nephropathy. Numerous studies have suggested that genetic predisposition to diabetic nephropathy exists, but genes for nephropathy have not yet been isolated. It is anticipated that a comprehensive analysis of a large number of uniformly phenotyped ESRD families will be necessary to isolated genes for ESRD. Such a database of families may not be available at any single institution. The charge of the FIND consortium was to acquire sets of families and individuals with well-characterized diabetic nephropathy, establish a secure master FIND database, and use genetic technologies to identify chromosomal regions linked with diabetic nephropathy in order to identify diabetic nephropathy susceptibility or protection genes. A Repository of samples collected during the FIND is essential for the FIND study to achieve its goals and for subsequent studies of this valuable sample collection.
