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Cell therapy to help repair tissue after acute kidney injury (AKI)


July 29, 2014

Dr. Kevin Burns has been awarded $100,000 from the Kidney Foundation of Canada to study the therapeutic effect of exosomes – vesicles that carry microRNA – derived from endothelial progenitor cells in acute kidney injury (AKI), a condition that affects about one out of every 20 people in hospital. Currently, there are no established treatments to repair an injured kidney after AKI. Dr. Burns and his team have isolated different “progenitor” cell populations from human umbilical cord blood and infused them into mice with AKI. They found that one cell population (endothelial colony forming cells) protected the mice from kidney injury, and they will now test the hypothesis that surface membrane particles are shed from these progenitor cells and are responsible for their beneficial effects.

About the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute
The Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI) is the research arm of The Ottawa Hospital and is an affiliated institute of the University of Ottawa, closely associated with the university’s Faculties of Medicine and Health Sciences. OHRI includes more than 1,700 scientists, clinical investigators, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and staff conducting research to improve the understanding, prevention, diagnosis and treatment of human disease.

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Ottawa Hospital Research Institute
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