Our laboratory studies kidney diseases and cancer. Compared to cancer, kidney diseases tend to attract less attention. In reality, kidney is vital to our health. A famous physiologist once said “The body is not composed of what the mouth takes in, but what the kidney decides to keep.” More than 1 in 10 adults in the US has some form of kidney disease and the cost for treating end stage kidney disease alone exceeds tens of billions of dollars a year.
In our laboratory, in parallel to creating and utilizing experimental models, we also directly study human patients to elucidate disease etiology and to develop new treatment strategy. We especially keen on applying emerging technologies in genetics and genomics to address fundamental questions that are also highly relevant clinically. Advancing precision medicine is our long term goal. Ongoing research focuses on key genetic pathways in kidney homeostasis and injury/repair, molecular circuitry regulating tumorigenesis, and functional genomic studies based on new discoveries from next generation sequencing data.
Visit the F. Chen lab page.