In 2000, when attorney Ken Kleinberg was diagnosed with a kidney condition, he turned to Dr. Vito Campese, who was then the Head of Nephrology and Hypertension at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California (USC). Campese was unable to determine the cause of Kleinberg’s condition because research on kidney diseases was very limited at the time.

The two discussed the lack of available information and the general scarcity of kidney research, eventually deciding to create a non-profit organization exclusively dedicated to funding research on kidney diseases. In 2002, they founded the University Kidney Research Organization (UKRO), and later, in collaboration with USC, they established the USC/UKRO Kidney Research Center, which was inaugurated in September 2015.