Research Awards Recipients

General Audience Summary

Background: The smallest parts of our body that work to keep us alive are called cells. Cells need the area where they live to be healthy, similar to people living in a home. This home, which we call the extracellular matrix (ECM), is made from many different building blocks and pieces needed for cells (people) to grow inside. Patients with various kidney diseases show signs of damage to the ECM home of kidney cells. This damage to the ECM home makes cells less healthy and unable to work well. As a result, cells turn into construction workers by repairing the damage using new ECM building blocks, which rebuild their ECM home to return to their usual job.

Purpose: Understanding how kidney cells fix damage from diseases could be used to help them heal faster and better. We will study how kidney cells prepare themselves and work together to repair. We also want to discover which specific building blocks cells need and how cells use them to repair their ECM home.

Procedure: Cells make a checklist of materials it needs to replace those damaged in an injured kidney. This list is like the “blueprint” of building materials needed to renovate a house. In this case, the blueprints are those used to fix a damaged kidney. Through our laboratory experiments, we will read the blueprint list that kidney cells use to repair their damaged ECM home. Once we find key building blocks from this kidney list, we will use them to study how they work with kidney cells.

Outcome: We found in a cell’s blueprints a building block that it uses for repair. Our identified building block helped start cells to repair their damaged ECM home because it was part of the foundation onto which cells need to rebuild. It also helped organize cells from other areas of the body to help kidney cells to heal. Relevance to patients: The discovery of a blueprint of building blocks would allow us to design drugs or supplements to treat kidney diseases. Such designs could help introduce each “building block” faster or fill in those missing from the list for a complete and quicker repair of a damaged ECM home. As a result, this will help cells rescue kidney function. Also, we would be able to find differences in building blocks when comparing a list taken from a healthy kidney with that of a damaged kidney. These differences could alert doctors when a patient has an injured kidney. Overall, this information could help kidney patients heal faster, which would improve the standard cost and quality of life for kidney patients.