Projects include:
- Comprehensive understanding of kidney fibrosis evolution in nephrotic syndromes and chronic kidney disease in general. To this end as a member of the Nephrotic Syndrome Network (NEPTUNE), we are deconvoluting transcriptomic signatures of fibrosis in an incident cohort of nephrotic syndromes. Also to model fibrosis and to image fibrosis, collaborative efforts with Drs. Moshe Levi and Jeffrey Kopp are underway to use advanced non-destructive imaging techniques and sensitive proteomic techniques in model systems of renal fibrosis in the setting of diabetes and obesity.
- We are using iPSC-derived renal organoids to model genetic forms of kidney disease as well as forms of kidney injury that are driven by environmental aberration. A principle area of interest using these models is to explore the effects of ApoL1 risk alleles and their associated toxicities on various cell compartments.
- Using expression microdissection (xMD), we are performing cellular microdissection followed by high-throughput next generation techniques for DNA, mRNA, small RNAs and protein to build cell-level datasets for comparison with diseased bioanalyte profiles of matched cellular subsets.