The use of preclinical animal models is integral to the safety assessment, pathogenesis research, and testing of diagnostic technologies and therapeutic interventions. With inherent similarity to human anatomy and physiology, various porcine models have been the preferred preclinical model in some research areas such as medical devices, wound healing, and skin therapies. The porcine model has been the cornerstone for interventional cardiology for the evaluation and development of this catheter-based renal denervation (RDN) therapy. The porcine model provides similar vascular access and renal neurovascular anatomy to humans. In these preclinical studies, the downstream kidneys from treated arteries are assessed for possible histopathological changes in the vessel dependent territories. In assessing renal safety following RDN, it becomes critical to distinguish treatment-related changes from pre-existing background pathologies. The incidence of background pathological changes in porcine kidneys has not been previously established in normal clinically healthy. Samples from the cranial, middle, and caudal portion of 331 naïve kidneys from 181 swine were processed histologically to slides and evaluated microscopically. The most commonly encountered spontaneous changes were chronic pyelonephritis found in nearly half of the evaluated naïve kidneys (∼40 %; score 1 = 91 %, score 2 = 8.4 %, score 3 = 0.76 %) followed by chronic interstitial inflammation in 9.7 % of the kidneys (score 1 = 90.6 %, score 2 = 9.4 %). Interestingly, there were a few rare spontaneous vascular changes that could potentially affect data interpretation in interventional and toxicology studies: arteritis and arteriolar dissection. The presence of pelvic cysts was a common occurrence (6.3 %) in the kidney. The domestic swine is a widely used preclinical species in interventional research, namely in the emerging field of transcatheter renal denervation. This retrospective study presents the historical incidence of spontaneous lesions recorded in the kidneys from naive pigs enrolled in renal denervation studies. There were commonly encountered changes of little pathological consequence such as pyelonephritis or pelvic cysts and rare vascular changes such as arteritis and arteriolar dissection that were of greater potential impact on study data interpretation. These results offer a benchmark by which to gage the potential effect of a procedure or treatment on renal histopathology in swine and assist in data interpretation.
Keywords: Animal models; Background lesions; Historical data; Kidney; Porcine renal histopathology; Renal denervation; Renal pathology; Swine.