Developing and using new technology to study the role of individual cells in kidney disease
With highly advanced technology and state-of-the-art methods, researcher Joan Camuñas studies individual cells in the search for new knowledge about their role in the development of kidney disease. In the long term, the goal is to develop personalized medicines. A grant of 1.6 million SEK from the Lundberg Research Foundation will be used to acquire new technology that significantly enhances the efficiency of the work.
Joan Camuñas, assistant professor at the Institute of Biomedicine at the University of Gothenburg, and his research group work at the intersection of genomics, biophysics, and precision medicine. Their mission is, among other things, to develop techniques that enable an understanding of how cells function—or malfunction—under various disease conditions, including kidney disease.
Kidney disease in diabetic patients
One area of focus is the development of new techniques to study individual cells, known as single-cell methods. In research related to diabetes, the team has previously developed and utilized such techniques to examine the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, which help regulate blood sugar levels.
– Kidney damage and chronic kidney disease are common and serious complications in diabetes, and there is no effective treatment. The technique we developed to study cells in the pancreas allows us to simultaneously determine if a patient’s cell is functioning correctly and to analyze the molecular activity within the cell. Along the way, we realized that the same technology could be used to study the kidneys, explains Joan Camuñas.
Understanding the process
He is now focused on the mechanisms that enable the kidneys to filter blood and regulate fluid balance, particularly involving proximal tubular epithelial cells (PTEC). These cells play a crucial role in kidney function and are affected early in disease progression. One of their tasks is to absorb the protein albumin from the blood. One sign of impaired kidney function is the presence of high levels of albumin in the urine, which occurs when epithelial cells malfunction, potentially leading to chronic kidney disease.
"We want to understand this process in diabetic patients—what damages the epithelial cells. We can study this by exposing the cells to various stressors or substances known to harm the kidneys and observe how the cells react. One such substance is glucose. Despite diabetic patients managing their blood sugar levels with medication, they still experience glucose spikes that damage the kidneys", says Joan Camuñas.
Cells that can repair themselves
His primary goal is to contribute knowledge about how kidney cells function and what causes them to stop performing their essential tasks. In collaboration with AstraZeneca’s research team on cardiovascular, kidney, and metabolic diseases, he also hopes to aid in the development of drugs that can correct the dysfunction in epithelial cells.
"It is well known that damaged kidney cells have the ability to repair themselves, or regenerate. Before we can develop drugs that stimulate this process, we need to understand the entire mechanism and identify the various stages of disease progression."
To make it possible to observe what happens within the epithelial cells, both when they are damaged and when they manage to repair themselves, Joan Camuñas and his team are developing new single-cell analysis techniques. These include performing several measurements on the same cells—first analyzing the cell's functions, then subjecting the same cell to a new process for genomic analysis.
Greater reliability with new equipment
A grant of 1.6 million SEK from the Lundberg Research Foundation is being used to purchase a specialized liquid handler, an instrument that allows researchers to handle nanoliter samples—cell samples in extremely small volumes (one milliliter equals one million nanoliters).
"With equipment capable of handling such small volumes, each experiment becomes much cheaper, enabling us to conduct much larger studies. This is important because studies on human cells often exhibit high variability. Now, we can analyze up to 1,000 cells at the same cost that previously only allowed for the analysis of ten. This speeds up our work and provides results with much greater reliability."
Text: Lundberg Research Foundation
Photo: Bo Håkansson