Dr. Lakshman Gunaratnam

Award: KRESCENT New Investigator Award
Institution: University of Western Ontario
Year: 2011-2014

Lay Summary

Dr. Lakshman Gunaratnam is a new investigator at the University of Western Ontario. He obtained his MD from the University of Ottawa and then completed his Post-Doctoral Fellowship, funded by the KRESCENT Program, with Dr. Joseph Bonventre at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Dr. Gunaratnam also received his clinical training in nephrology and transplantation at Harvard Medical School. The focus of his research program is acute kidney injury (AKI), which affects about 5% of all hospitalized patients. Despite considerable advances in diagnosis and management of AKI, the high mortality rates associated with severe AKI remain largely unchanged. AKI is most often caused by circulatory collapse resulting in reduced blood supply to the kidney (ischemia) that leads to widespread death of kidney epithelial cells. The rapid removal of dead cells occurs through a process known as "phagocytosis" that is vital to preventing further inflammation and hastening tissue repair. Recent advances suggest that surviving kidney epithelial cells express KIM-1, a gene product that enables surviving kidney epithelial cells to clear dead or dying cells from the injured kidney by phagocytosis. Dr. Gunaratnam’s research aims to understand the complex cell signalling pathways that govern how KIM-1 enables kidney epithelial cells to mediate phagocytosis. His laboratory hopes to develop novel strategies to enhance this inherent (KIM-1 dependent) kidney protective mechanism to improve clinical outcomes in patients with AKI.