Washington University in St. Louis (WU)
I am interested in the diagnosis and management of dysregulated complement activation in immune-mediated kidney diseases including transplant rejection. I have recently shown that complement receptor 1 expressed in the kidney is a potent regulator of complement activation. Also, recent discovery of the novel intracellular complement pathway in kidney cells based on complement C3 is rather intriguing. I am involved in deciphering how this system functions normally and in disease. Over the past decade, we have also identified genetic variants in complement proteins in patients with two prominent kidney diseases, atypical hemolytic uremic syndrome and C3 glomerulopathy. I am specifically interested in variant analysis and in devising simpler functional assays for analysis of the putative mutants. This will facilitate the identification of the phenotype/genotype correlations in cohorts of patients with renal diseases in which complement activation plays a key role in pathogenesis and direct the patient to appropriate therapy.