Samira Musah
Duke University, NC·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Chronic kidney disease affects more than 15% of U.S. adults and about 850 million people worldwide.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biology
- Topics
chronic kidney disease
end-stage kidney disease
kidney failure
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Aug 2026
What they work on
- Use human stem cell-derived kidney models, including organoids and organ-on-chip systems, to identify tunable molecular targets that let specific cell types sense injury and trigger tissue repair.
- Engineer synthetic gene circuits, programmed genetic switches, that let damaged podocytes, the kidney's irreplaceable filtering cells, detect injury and autonomously start repair.
- Apply these circuits to injured glomerular tissue in human stem cell-based models to test whether self-acting repair can restore the kidney's blood-filtering function.
More about the research
No therapy is proven to reverse it or even halt its progression to kidney failure. Once the kidneys fail, the only options are dialysis, which patients typically survive for five to ten years, and transplantation, which many never receive. The most severe kidney diseases damage podocytes. These are specialized cells that wrap around the tiny blood vessels of the glomerulus, the kidney's filtering unit, and help remove toxins and waste from the blood. Podocytes do not replace themselves, so damage from drug side effects, viral infections, or genetic and environmental risk factors often leads to lasting kidney failure. Animal models also often fail to reproduce human kidney biology and drug responses, which slows progress.
Why it matters
Patients with chronic kidney disease currently have no therapy that reverses the disease, and many die waiting for a transplant. Human stem cell-based kidney models and self-acting repair circuits for podocytes could open new ways to restore glomerular filtration. This could provide new therapeutic approaches for kidney disease and reduce reliance on dialysis and transplantation.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
William Chen
University of South Dakota, SD·Biomedical Engineering
Engineer mouse bone marrow MSCs carrying synthetic genetic circuits that detect inflammatory signals, improve MSC survival and shift tissue inflammation from destructive to constructive, tested in cell, organoid and animal models.
Arthur Matas
University of Minnesota, MN·Medicine & Clinical Research
Compare the long-term risk of end-stage kidney disease (ESKD, kidney failure requiring dialysis or transplant) and death between living kidney donors and healthy matched controls from the Rochester Epidemiology Project, with over 40 years of follow-up.
Sethu Madhavan
Ohio State University, OH·Medicine & Clinical Research
Define how ACOX1, the rate-limiting enzyme of peroxisomal fat breakdown, drives injury specific to the APOL1 G1 and G2 kidney risk variants, using overexpression plus gain- and loss-of-function manipulation in human podocytes.
The school
Duke University: 61 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 417 research doctorates a year.
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