Destaques

On February 15, at 11 am

Moderator: Mirian Hayashi, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Pharmacology, Escola Paulista de Medicina - Unifesp

Irrespective of the underlying disease, both acute and chronic kidney injury are associated by various tissue remodeling programs, such as inflammation, fibrosis, repair responses and (lymph-)angiogenesis aiming at renal recovery, however which upon chronicity lead to loss of renal function. Such tissue damage pathways are driven by a plethora of mediators produced mainly by activated endothelial and epithelial cells, and recruited inflammatory cells. The biological activity of many of these mediators, including growth factors, chemokines, complement factors and adhesion molecules is dependent on the binding with heparan sulfate proteoglycans (HSPGs). Upon injury, the kidney not only induces a number of mediators, but also starts up the HSPG turbo to accelerate tissue responses. In this Seminar I will highlight this paradigm by illustrating the amplifying role of renal HSPGs, especially tubular syndecan-1 in tubular regeneration and inflammation upon various forms of renal injury. Besides, we obtained ample evidence that tubular syndecan-1 can be exploited as receptive structure for cell penetrating peptides such as crotamine which enables specific targeting of renal proximal tubular epithelial cells. This approach allowed us to down-regulate complement activation on tubular epithelial cells, which might be of clinical importance.

Speaker: Jacob van den Born, associate professor at State Univ Groningen, Dept. Nephology Univ Med Center Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands

Dr. Jacob van den Born started his scientific career in 1987 after finishing his study Biology at State Univ Utrecht, The Netherlands. In 1992, he obtained his PhD degree at the Catholic Univ Nijmegen, The Netherlands on the role of heparan sulfate proteoglycans in glomerular filtration. In his post-doc time he was trained in heparin/heparan sulfate glycobiology in Prof. Ulf Lindahl’s group in Uppsala, Sweden. From 2000 onwards he became assistant professor at Dept. Cell Biology and Immunology of Free Univ Amsterdam, the Netherlands and from 2007 he became associate professor at State Univ Groningen heading the research laboratory of the Dept. Nephology within the Univ Med Center Groningen. Dr. van den Born received prestigious awards for his contributions in Nephrology. He published >180 peer reviewed papers, most of them related to innate immunity and tissue remodeling in various renal conditions. Next to his scientific achievements, he proved to be a great teacher and fulfilled a number of board position, among which the Dutch Federation of Nephrology.