Roufosse
lab
Kidney Immune Cell Imaging Satellite Laboratory
Our lab investigates immune-mediated kidney injury using human tissue samples.
Clinical and pathology expertise from Imperial College and Imperial College NHS Healthcare Trust complements the cross-scale, cross-modality imaging expertise within the Crick's Electron Microscopy STP, with the aim of producing highly phenotyped clinical, molecular and morphological ("pathomic") datasets to deliver new insights into human kidney disease.
Kidney failure is a global disease crisis. 850 million people are affected with kidney disease worldwide (~11% of the world population). At the global level, 5 year survival rate for those who reach end stage kidney failure and start dialysis is just 35% – worse than most cancers. Where transplantation is available it offers increased survival and quality of life, but the life span of a transplanted organ is limited by immune rejection.
Immune cells mediate acute and chronic renal failure in both native and transplant kidneys, through disease initiation in auto- and allo-immune diseases, and as effectors of injury in diabetes and hypertension. Immune-mediated kidney injury involves co-ordinated contributions from innate and adaptive immunity, including T cell-mediated injury and antibody-mediated injury.
Future therapies are dependent on detailed characterisation of the identity and activation state of immune cells involved, and of the cross-talk between immune cells, and between immune cells and kidney parenchymal cells.
As part of an MRC-funded project(“A Nanopathology Platform for Prediction and Early Detection of Disease in Kidney Transplant Rejection”), we have developed improved tissue handling pathways for human tissue, to enable linkage of molecular data to morphological characteristics across scales, from whole sample imaging down to the intracellular/nanopathology scale. We aim to provide an models of disease and an atlas of immune cell identities, activation states and “interactomics” in a range of human kidney diseases, using spatial and quantitative data across scales.
