Profile
- Department/Institute:
- Department of Medicine IV, LMU Hospital
- Subject area:
- Immunology, Immunothrombosis, Kidney disease
- Name of supervisor:
- Prof. Dr. med. Hans-Joachim Anders
- Number of open positions:
- 1
- Project title:
- Combination therapy for chronic kidney disease (including impact of pregnancy on treated CKD)
- Project time plan
- Full Doctoral Study-Model: 36 or 48 months
Sandwich-Model: 12 or 24 months - Language requirements:
- Strong English skills in speaking, writing and reading as English is the only language shared by all lab members.
- Academic requirements:
- We favour candidates from non-clinical backgrounds, that desire to develop an academic career in competetive research rather than clinical medicine/surgery. Candidates from clinical backgrounds are also welcome.
Project description:
Combination therapy for CKD is on the rise to prolong kidney lifespan and to delay cardiovascular and other CKD complications. The current standard of care has become dual RAS/SGLT2 Inhibition for non-diabetic CKD and triple therapy with RAS/SGLT2/MR inhibition for diabetic CKD. We expect that other drugs with synergistic mechanisms of action can help to further improve outcomes conceptually similar to the quadruple combination used for heart failure. We use a spontaneous mouse model of CKD (Col4a3-/- mice) mimicking CKD in Alport syndrome. As a no touch model we use oral combination therapies as food admix and observe lifespan up to starting symptomatic uremia as a (hard) primary endpoint to assess novel therapies. We previously demonstrated that triple therapy including the MR antagonist finerenone substantially increases uremia free lifespan with drastic effects on kidney fibrogenesis, podocyte loss, and tubular atrophy. We continue to test other experimental and clinical drug candidates. The strong renoprotective effect of such combinations allows first time to study the impact of a pregnancy on CKD progression. Unpublished data show that a pregnancy significantly reduces the protective effect of such drugs because pregnancy massively increases the hemodynamic and metabolic workload on the ill kidney. This opens a completely new line of research trying on one end to further improve kidney and pregnancy outcomes with better combinations but on the other end to study the impact of pregnancy at all on kidney disease. This project requires organization and management skills to coordinate these sophisticated studies with mice generated by heterozygous breeding and genotyping. Previous publications using this model include Schreier et al, Kidney 360 2025, Zhu et al. J Am Soc Nephrol 2023, Ryu et al, Kidney Int 2011 and J Pathol 2012.
Several theses have been completed in the lab after generating data using this model.
To applicants: Please send following initial application documents to LMU-CSCOffice before December 15th:
- Resume and Research Motivation Letter
- Certificate of Proficiency in English, equivalent to IELTS Test Academic 6.5 (no module below 6) or TOEFL IBT 95, is required
- Two letters of recommendation directly sent from your current Supervisors/Professors to LMU-CSC Office
Contact LMU-CSC Office: csc.international@lmu.de