Research Awards Recipients

Lay Summary

Kidney stones affect approximately 1 in 10 people in Canada during their lifetime and this predisposes to chronic kidney disease. Today, no drug efficiently treats or prevents these painful events, mainly because we still do not understand what causes the formation of these "stones" in our kidneys.

Dr. Cordat’s study of a rare disease called distal renal tubular acidosis led her to identify a protein, claudin-4, which when eliminated from mice kidney results in elevated urinary calcium, a pre-requisite to the formation of kidney stones. She hypothesizes that claudin-4 contributes to calcium balance in our body. In the first Aim of this project, she will dissect the contribution of this protein to calcium reabsorption in the kidneys, using a renal cell line mimicking the section of the kidney where claudin-4 is expressed. In the second Aim of the project, she will turn to mice where claudin-4 have been eliminated to dissect the physiology associated with calcium imbalance in these animals. 

At the end of the project, she hopes to improve our understanding of the role of claudin-4 in calcium balance and will be in an ideal position to start identifying drugs that can target claudin-4 as a potential remedy to treat kidney stone formers.