Vishal S. Vaidya, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Environmental Health at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health. He is also an Associate Faculty at the Harvard University’s Center for Environment. Vishal directs the laboratory of kidney toxicology and regeneration in the renal division of Brigham and Women's Hospital with a research emphasis on discovery and evaluation of biomarkers and biosensors for early detection of kidney injury and investigating the molecular mechanisms of kidney tissue repair.
Brigham and Women's Hospital: Awards, Honors and Grants Press Release - Sep 13, 2011
NIH Outstanding New Environmental Scientist Award
Vishal Vaidya, PhD
Vishal S. Vaidya, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Renal Division of BWH, Harvard Medical School and in the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard School of Public Health, has been awarded the Outstanding New Environmental Scientist (ONES) Award from the NIH’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). The prestigious honor, which recognizes six to eight recipients annually, is a five-year, $1.62 million award.
The goal of the ONES Award is to identify and attract outstanding new environmental health researchers and target exceptionally talented early stage investigators who intend to make a long-term career commitment to research in the mission areas of the NIEHS and assist them in launching an innovative research program focusing on problems of environmental exposures and human biology, human pathophysiology and human disease.
A primary goal of Dr. Vaidya’s project is to understand fibrinogen signal transduction in kidney regeneration following acute or chronic injury, which may provide opportunities for early diagnosis, prevention, and therapeutic interventions.
Congratulations!!! to Dana who won the "Renal Toxicology Award" sponsored by the Mechanisms Specialty Section at the 50th Anniversary of Society of Toxicology meeting on March 9th, 2011 in Washington DC. Dana presented her poster titled "Urinary fibrinogen: A mechanistic translational biomarker for vascular dysfunction and inflammation in the kidney"
The Society of Toxicology was founded in 1961 as a not-for-profit scientific society and is dedicated to developing knowledge for the improvement of the health and safety of living beings and the protection of their environment.
Science 10 September 2010: Vol. 329. no. 5997, p. 1373 DOI: 10.1126/science.329.5997.1373
LIFE SCIENCE TECHNOLOGIES: Biomarker Hunters Probe the Proteome.
Alan Dove
The advent of sophisticated new tools has drawn many researchers into the burgeoning field of proteomic biomarker discovery, but turning their discoveries into clinical tests is still a tall order.
THE LONG HAUL
Single-marker tests are also on the agenda of Vishal Vaidya, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, whose work also highlights the challenges of validating a clinical biomarker.
More than a decade ago, researchers at Harvard decided to look for biomarkers of kidney injury using representational difference analysis, a PCR-based technique that predated the advent of transcriptomic microarrays. The screening identified kidney injury molecule 1 (Kim-1), an immunoglobulin-like membrane protein whose expression in the urine spikes after acute kidney injury.
Vaidya joined the effort at that point. "My first project was to take cells that overexpress the Kim-1 protein, isolate this protein through regular chromatographic purification techniques, inject it into the mice, make antibodies, screen for specific epitopically distinct antibodies, and make a very conventional ELISA [enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay]," he says.
NIEHS-supported researchers have identified a new biomarker for kidney toxicology that could lead to better and faster diagnosis of kidney injury, with potential applications in the clinical setting as well as in drug development.
Acute kidney injury, including drug-induced toxicity, is a common and often fatal clinical condition with a mortality rate of 40-80 percent in intensive care settings. Nephrotoxicity in animal studies is a major factor in the failure of many candidate drugs because of the lack of precise biomarkers for monitoring early kidney injury.
The research team tested transmembrane tubular protein kidney injury molecule -1 (Kim-1) as a superior marker for kidney injury. Traditional markers of renal injury, such as blood urea nitrogen (BUN), serum creatinine (SCr), and N-acetyl-beta D-glucosaminidase (NAG), lack the sensitivity or specificity necessary to detect nephrotoxicity before considerable loss of function occurs.
The researchers used rat toxicology studies to compare the diagnostic performance of Kim-1 to BUN, SCr, and NAG as predictors of kidney tubule damage scored by histopathology. The results show that Kim-1 outperforms all three of the other markers in multiple rat model of kidney injury. The study authors conclude that Kim-1 measurement will significantly aid the prediction of human kidney toxicity in candidate drugs by early identification and elimination of compounds that are potentially nephrotoxic.
Brigham Renal Division Research at the Center of an International Effort to Identify Next Generation Biomarkers to Screen Kidney Toxicity
Boston, MA – The kidney is one of the primary targets for toxicity of drugs. Two serum biomarkers, serum creatinine (SCr) and blood urea nitrogen (BUN), are commonly used to detect kidney toxicity in preclinical and clinical studies and in routine clinical care. Both, however, have severe limitations relating to sensitivity and specificity.
New research from the laboratories of Vishal S. Vaidya, a Faculty in the Renal Division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Assistant Professor of Medicine at HMS and Joseph V. Bonventre, the Samuel A. Levine Professor of Medicine, Health Sciences and Technology at HMS and chief of the renal division at BWH in collaboration with the Predictive Safety Testing Consortium, has resulted in the approval of Kidney Injury Molecule-1 (Kim-1) as a highly sensitive and specific marker of drug-induced kidney injury by both the FDA and EMA and is expected to greatly facilitate evaluation of tubular toxicity in certain preclinical and clinical settings.
Drug-makers have come up with a new set of tools to determine if a promising therapy might damage the kidneys. In the latest issue ofNature Biotechnology, researchers describe the validation of seven specific biomarkers for kidney damage that are found in urine1,2,3,4. It is hoped that these will accelerate drug development from animal safety studies to human clinical trials. The biomarkers are the first major results of a collaboration between pharmaceutical companies, regulatory agencies and academic scientists that was formed in response to a worrying lack of promising drugs in the development pipeline. "In drug development, what one wants to do is fail early on so you can put your resources into drugs that are more likely to succeed," says Carl Peck, former head of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Silver Spring, Maryland, who is now at the Center for Drug Development Science, run by the University of California, San Francisco. Peck, who was not involved in the research, estimates that the biomarkers could speed drug development by one to three years.
Acute kidney injury, a common result of crush injuries, severe burns and exposure to toxic chemicals, may be deadly in up to 50 percent of the soldiers it affects. A wide range of other factors, including hemorrhagic fever, diabetes and heart bypass surgery, can also lead to kidney injury.
Yet there hasn’t been a way to detect changes in the kidney before serious damage occurs—until now. A new technology, the RenaStick, will enable medical staff to provide early, aggressive treatment to prevent or reverse the injury.
A urine test that can rapidly detect acute kidney injury is described in a new study published in Kidney International. "The methodology is identical to the off-the-shelf pregnancy test," says Vishal Vaidya from Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, who describes the test as a "convenient, quick, and clear 'yes or no' diagnostic assay for kidney damage."
This Commentary discusses concepts related to the development of the point-of-care (POC) diagnostic system and its advantages and disadvantages. Also discussed are the patient, provider, and financial outcomes that ought to be evaluated before the POC test becomes available for clinical use.
Vishal S. Vaidya, PhD, of the Renal Division of BWH, has been awarded the NIH Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00) from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
