Tim Lougheed
A freshly minted facility is adding to the University’s growing concentration of expertise in the field of kidney disease, a health problem that is taking on major proportions in Canadian society.
The single open laboratory concept is a deliberate move to foster research collaboration.
“This is the best way to do research,” explains Centre director Dr. Kevin Burns. “It means a lot of traffic, a lot of people walking by, interacting. There’s nothing that replaces the power of physical proximity to enhance research. If you’re in separate labs, you could be doing some work and ordering supplies, then you walk around to the next lab and find out that lab is doing similar work.”
The Centre complements the mission of the Ottawa Hospital’s Kidney Care Centre at the hospital’s Riverside Campus, where clinical research activities are focused on early detection of kidney disease, and more effective treatments for people on life-support dialysis or those with kidney transplants. Burns spearheaded the development of that centre, which opened in 2000 and later received $7.1 million from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Innovation Trust for construction and equipment.
The new Centre is dedicated to pure research, examining some of the fundamental biochemical mechanisms that might be responsible for kidney failure. The number of Canadians suffering from such ailments is growing at a rate of eight to nine per cent annually, Burns notes, making fundamental research the next logical step.
The two leading causes of kidney ailments – diabetes and high blood pressure – are also becoming more prevalent in Canada. People manage these conditions for as long as 10 or 20 years while their kidney function slowly deteriorates, without symptoms, until finally these vital organs shut down. Scientists are still trying to understand exactly how this damage occurs and how it could be prevented.
“We’re being very proactive, looking at ways to intervene before trouble begins,” says Burns. “Of course that raises a lot of challenges, because you’re looking at people who feel otherwise well.”
He is therefore pleased that the Centre has been able to draw together the efforts of five principal researchers and dozens of their staff, who were formerly located in disparate parts of the campus. One of these scientists, Dr. Rhian Touyz, came to the University specifically to join this new unit as holder of the Canada Research Chair in Hypertension.
“She’s studying the mechanisms underlying hypertension,” says Burns. “How it causes kidney damage, how it causes vessel damage, uncovering new pathways that can be used for novel kinds of therapies.”
Even more revealing for Burns is the example of Dr. Chris Kennedy, who is analyzing the behaviour of a key cell (the glomerular podocyte) responsible for the kidney’s filtering ability. He had been working exclusively with mice, but by looking at how to isolate these cells in human urine, his work is pointing the way to a test for patients with early kidney disease.
“We wouldn’t have done that if he had been in isolation,” Burns insists, “instead of in this environment, where you have clinical medicine interacting with basic science.”
