DDR1 in fibrosis and diabetic kidney disease

Life it's incredible. There are stuff that stick to You.

The watch of your father (that was also your father's father one), the smell of a flower, the flavor of your favorite ice cream or the city you think of when you are in an horrible hotel (the city where you had your University studies or where you met your partner). Sometimes proteins stick to scientist. In my case an odd receptor tyrosine kinase named DDR1. A day, a colleague at Roche left me a proposal on my desk: “For Marco, have a look, might be of interest for your fibrosis dada [French for favorite topic]”. I did. It took me more than the afternoon I’ve originally planned to read the proposal. It took me 5 years. That work is now published on J Transl Med and looks to pretty on PubMed: If you are interested to renal fibrosis that might be a paper you want to read. It might take your afternoon or more…

p.s.

DDR1 was recently shown, by Jose Florez, at the Podocyte meeting in Montreal, as a nice peak in his GWAS study of 20,000 diabetics to look for loci associated with nephropathy. COL4A3 (ligand of DDR1) and DDR1 were the top 2 hits!