O’Brien will map the kidney nerve network from acute injury to chronic disease for the first time in a high-risk/high reward project.
Sympathetic and sensory neurons innervate the kidney, with sympathetic neurons playing key roles in regulating blood flow and fluid balance and sensory neurons sending critical information about physiological changes within the kidney to the central nervous system. Together, these neurons form an overall network and maintain physiological homeostasis within the kidney. Changes in the activity of these neurons can lead to kidney disease. However, scientists’ knowledge of the role kidney nerves play in disease is primarily related to hypertension, highlighting a significant gap in the scientific understanding of other kidney-related disease states and an area that has been largely ignored.
Lori O’Brien, an assistant professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Physiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, pioneered whole tissue imaging of the kidney to visualize neuronal kidney networks in 3D and understand kidney innervation under normal conditions. O’Brien predicts that neuronal network organization is significantly altered in kidney disease and parallels histological and functional changes.
She recently received an Innovative Science Accelerator Award from the Innovative Science Accelerator (ISAC) Program to map the spatiotemporal relationship of kidney innervation to disease state. The ISAC Award provides $100,000 in support over one year to small, innovative, high-risk/high reward projects with the potential to accelerate breakthrough discoveries in kidney, urologic, and hematologic research.
O’Brien plans to carefully map the kidney nerve network from acute kidney injury to chronic kidney disease to uncover for the first time how nerve organization and associations with a variety of kidney cell targets change over time. They will address whether an imbalance of sympathetic versus sensory innervation and thereby proper modulation of activity may drive disease progression. These data will provide the first whole tissue mapping of injury and disease progression with the ability to identify significant spatiotemporal changes to nephrons, immune cells, and vasculature that cannot be discerned from tissue sections.
“Our studies have the potential to shift our experimental and clinical approaches and consider how nerve-kidney associations impact disease,” wrote O’Brien. “Modulating kidney nerves post-injury could slow or stop disease progression, or even promote repair, providing new therapeutic options, which are currently lacking.”
To read the award news on the ISAC program’s website see this link.