Associate Center Director
Professor of Medicine
Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School
Bonventre’s lab is interested in kidney injury and repair, and the use of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) to model Polycystic Kidney Disease and other ciliopathies.
Joseph V. Bonventre MD, PhD is Samuel A. Levine Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School. He is Chief of the Division of Renal Medicine of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and also Chief of the Biomedical Engineering Division, which he founded, at the BWH. Dr. Bonventre’s research focuses primarily on the study of kidney injury and repair and signal transduction, with a special emphasis on the role of inflammation, biomarkers and stem cells. His laboratory published the first demonstration of creation of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell lines from individuals with polycystic kidney diseas. These cells and cells differentiated from the iPSCs have an abnormality with plausable significance for understanding the etiology of the disease. iPS cells generated from fibroblasts of humans with autosomal dominant PKD had reduced ciliary levels of polycystin-2 which could be rescued in iPS-derived hepatoblasts by overexpression of polycystin-1. This work opens up the possibility to conduct “clinical trials in a dish” of potential novel therapies for PKD using patient-specific cells. His laboratory also recently reported a rapid and efficient process by which human iPS and embryonic stem (ES) cells can be differentiated into intermediate mesoderm that forms tubules expressing kidney proximal tubule markers. His laboratory is one of only a handful in the world that has been successful at directed differentiation to kidney lineage cells, and is one of the leading labs in this effort in the US. He has a great deal of experience with various animal models of AKI and chronic kidney disease.
Dr. Bonventre is past-president of the American Society of Nephrology, past director of the Harvard MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, and founding director of the kidney group of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. He has been elected to the American Society of Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. He has been awarded the Osler Medal of the Royal Society of Physicians and the Bywaters Award, for his contributions to the field of Acute Kidney Injury, by the International Society of Nephrology. He has received two MERIT awards from the NIH. He is a member of the NIH NIDDK Advisory Council and serves as an advisor to many academic institutions, pharmaceutical companies and biotechnology companies. Dr. Bonventre’s work has been cited more than 38,000 times and he has an h-index of 107.
PUBLICATIONS
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