Gonville & Caius College postgraduate student Cristina Pinel Neparidze (Surgery PhD 2023) has daily reminders for her motivation to work towards a cure for kidney disease. 

Cristina works at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, funded by Kidney Research UK and supervised by transplant surgeon Professor Kourosh Saeb-Parsy. The proximity to the clinical wards, patients, and their friends and families brings home the potential value of her research.

“I work on the ninth floor of the hospital and in the labs there,” she says. “We also have wards with teenagers who have cancer. You share the lifts with them and their families and you see many things. That's a daily reminder for me that what I work on is important and will hopefully end up helping people. My research is translational – from the lab bench to the bedside.”

Additional personal motivation comes from her uncle, who received renal replacement therapy (dialysis) for 30 years and endured a rejected transplant before dying as a result of chronic kidney disease after a complicated infection. Cristina's project focuses on adult-onset polycystic kidney disease (PKD), a renal condition where the average kidney, which is comparable in size to an avocado, can grow to become as big as a rugby ball due to the development of cysts. PKD patients experience declining kidney function until, similarly to her uncle, they end up requiring renal replacement therapy. Available therapies slow disease progression but cannot stop it.

Cristina is seeking to learn more about how to limit the growth of the cysts. Growing organoids, three-dimensional structures with different types of cells, researchers can more accurately represent the impact and development of the disease. The aim of Cristina’s PhD is to create a disease model to be used to understand the disease in vitro (in a laboratory dish) and in vivo (in a living organism).

Not only will Cristina and her colleagues seek to learn from their kidney organoids, but they also plan to work alongside pharmaceutical companies to support the development of new treatments for PKD. Cristina also hopes to expand the application of kidney organoids to other conditions such as renal ischaemia reperfusion injury, where their transplantation into damaged kidneys could also offer regenerative potential. 

Cristina would like to progress from her PhD to a postdoctoral research position, with a longer-term aim in entrepreneurship. She is intrigued by the idea of launching a spinout company.

“People are realising the potential and importance of research beyond academia,” she says.

“Funding is being given to bright scientists who have intellectual property that can be commercialised. As a researcher, it gives you the opportunity to not only stay in academia, but to have more options, more opportunities in industry and startups, and particularly you can have more independence.”