Dean’s Seminar Series featuring John Cijiang He, MD, PhD – “Development of New Therapies for Diabetic Kidney Disease”

Dean’s Seminar Series

John Cijiang He, MD, PhD
Irene and Dr. Arthur M. Fishberg Professor of Medicine
Professor of Pharmacological Sciences
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Chief, Division of Nephrology
Mount Sinai Health System

Title & Abstract: 

“Development of New Therapies for Diabetic Kidney Disease”

Diabetic kidney disease (DKD) is the most common kidney disease in the world leading to kidney failure. The treatment of DKD is very limited. Several drugs have been recently approved as new therapies for DKD such as SGLT2 inhibitors and mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists. However, many DKD patients still progress to renal failure regardless of these interventions. Therefore, we need to develop better drugs to treat this devastating disease. Here, we will discuss how we use systems biology approach to develop new drug targets and drugs for DKD. Through this approach, we identified HIPK2 as a major driver for kidney fibrosis and we are developing HIPK2 inhibitors as novel anti-fibrosis therapies for DKD. We also identified Tyro3 agonists as drugs to protect podocyte injury in early DKD. We are also developing new biomarkers to select high risk patient population for clinical trials. We hope that these new approaches could help us to develop new drugs to treat patients with DKD.