Mechanisms of Kidney Regeneration to be Studied at Medical College

The Medical College of Wisconsin has received a $1.7 million, five-year grant from the National Institute of Health’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases to study possible drug therapies for acute kidney injury.
Frank Park, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine and Kevin R. Regner, M.D., assistant professor of medicine, the primary investigators on the grant, are both in the division of nephrology.
Kidney transplantation and certain cardiovascular surgeries can lead to ischemia-reperfusion injury, a common cause of acute kidney injury (AKI). Virtually every kidney transplant patient suffers some degree of AKI early after transplant. Severe AKI has high rates of sickness and death, and currently, there are no effective drug therapies.
The investigators’ recent studies identified a protein regulator, known as Activator of G protein Signaling 3, that is believed to play a unique role in regenerating kidney tissue after AKI. This study seeks to provide genetic and molecular evidence to support that hypothesis. Dr. Park and Dr. Regner will study the critical importance of this regulator in genetically modified mice to determine whether it may prove to be a novel therapeutic target for drug development to treat AKI.