Pedro Reis Pereira › Research
Research
My work sits between the clinic and the lab: characterising how the kidney is injured in metabolic disease, and trying to detect that injury in urine and blood before it shows up as lost function.
Obesity-related kidney disease
This was the subject of my PhD in Medical Sciences at ICBAS, University of Porto (2019–2025), Clinical and Molecular Characterization of the Spectrum of Obesity Related Kidney Disorders, supervised by Prof. Anabela Rodrigues and co-supervised by Prof. Mariana P. Monteiro. I led a prospective cohort of patients undergoing bariatric metabolic surgery with serial clinical and laboratory evaluation, and was responsible for protocol design, recruitment, informed consent, longitudinal data collection and safety oversight.
What came out of it: kidney dysfunction in surgical candidates is not one phenotype but several (Biomolecules 2023, Obesity Surgery 2025); proteinuria remission after surgery follows distinct trajectories rather than a single average response (Am J Physiol Renal Physiol 2026); early-stage CKD changes weight-loss outcomes after gastric bypass (Obesity Surgery 2023); and the cardiovascular benefit of surgery is not evenly distributed across patients (Front Endocrinol 2018).
Urinary biomarkers, metabolomics and proteomics
The methodological core of the same problem. Untargeted urinary proteomics after obesity surgery-induced weight loss showed nephroprotective and systemic adaptations that routine clinical chemistry does not see (J Proteome Res 2026). The broader case for metabolomics in early diagnosis and prognosis of diabetic kidney disease is set out in a review in Medicinal Research Reviews. The omics work is done with national and international reference laboratories.
Kidney transplantation and living donation
Clinical and outcomes research from the transplant programme at ULS Santo António: long-term eGFR trajectories in European living donors (Transplant International 2024), CT volumetry versus nuclear renography for predicting post-donation function (Int Urol Nephrol 2023), donor-specific antibodies and the timing of antibody-mediated rejection (Cureus 2022), biologically unrelated versus related living donors (Cureus 2022), the relative weight of living donation over HLA mismatching (Cureus 2023), and why potential donors do not go on to donate (Transplant Proc 2022).
Glomerular and rare kidney disease
Clinically I work on glomerular disease, kidney biopsy and kidney pathology. I am the local contact for the European Rare Kidney Disease Reference Network (ERKNet), and co-investigator in the Portuguese IgA Nephropathy registry, in the renal and vasculitis modules of Reuma.pt, and in RICERCARE, the Portuguese Society of Nephrology screening programme for Fabry disease in CKD stages 1–5. Recent congress work covers predictors of progression in primary membranous nephropathy, the prognostic weight of glomerular C3 deposition, and kidney outcomes in ANCA-associated vasculitis (see publications).
Ageing and longevity
A newer line, and the reason the biomarker methods matter beyond the kidney: the same omics-plus-machine-learning approach used to date kidney injury can be turned on biological ageing itself. I am interested in measuring it well enough to test whether it can be slowed, halted or reversed.
Methods
Prospective and retrospective clinical cohorts, registry-based outcomes research, untargeted metabolomics and proteomics, and machine learning on clinical and omics data — with the ethics committee approvals, GDPR compliance and biospecimen governance that go with them.