Nefrology

Renal Inflammation and REpair (RIRE)

Prof. dr S. Florquin, Renal Pathologist, P.I., Department of Pathology, Academic Medical Center, University ofAmsterdam 

Sandrine Florquin (1965) received her MD degree from the Faculty of Medicine of the Universite Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) in 1990, her “Thèse d’Agrégation de l’Enseignement Supérieur”from the same University in 1995, and her PhD degree (cum laude) from the University of Leiden (The Netherlands) in 1997. In 1998 she was board certified in the Netherlands in Pathology, and in 2001 in Immunology. From 1991 to 1994, she was Research Fellow of Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique(Belgium) in the department of Immunology of Prof. M. Goldman, Université Libre de Bruxelles and in the departments Prof. B. Brenner and R. Cotran (Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard University). Since 1998 Florquin is staff member of the Department of Pathology in het AMC. Her research is embedded in the Center for Immunology Amsterdam (CIA). She received several NWO-grants (Clinical Fellowship, ASPASIA and VIDI). In 2007 she was appointed Professor of Pathology in theUniversity of Amsterdam. She is a member of the Scientific Board of the Dutch Kidney Foundation and of the ERA-EDTA.

Research Programs: Renal Inflammation and REpair (RIRE)

Thanks to the financial support of NWO and Dutch Kidney Foundation, we set up a research group dedicated to unravel the immunological mechanisms involved in renal injury and repair and to design new therapeutic tools for renal diseases.

To unravel the involvement of innate immunity in the renal diseases, we used relevant rodent models for acute and chronic renal injury (ischemia-reperfusion, obstructive nephropathy, renal transplantation and pyelonephritis using knock-out mice, transgenic mice, anti-sense oligonucleotide and blocking antibodies), renal biopsies, urine and plasma of renal patients, and in vitro models (tubular epithelial cell and endothelial cell cultures).

Our research line can be divided in 4 sub-themes:

a) The role of CD44 in Renal Injury and Repair
b) The role of Pattern-Recognition Receptors (PRRs) in Renal Injury and Repair
c) The fibrinolytic and clotting systems in Renal Injury and Repair
d) Development of validated analyses of renal transplant biopsies to identify local markers
of tolerance and to predict the development of fibrosis