Shuaishuai Xie
China
KI-ISN Early Career Researcher: Basic Science
The KI-ISN Early-career Researcher Awards recognize outstanding research in basic and clinical science published inKidney International (KI) in the year leading up to WCN.
Shuaishuai Xie is a Ph.D. candidate in pharmacology at Anhui Medical University in Anhui, China, under the supervision of Prof. Xiaoming Meng. His research focuses on the molecular mechanisms underlying kidney injury and repair, with an emphasis on translational therapeutic strategies. During his graduate training, he published four original research articles as first author in leading international journals, including Kidney International (KI), Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, and Molecular Therapy. In his recent study published in KI, he identified methyltransferase-like 1 (METTL1) as a critical driver of acute kidney injury (AKI) progression. He demonstrated that METTL1-mediated N7-methylguanosine (m7G) modification stabilizes TEA domain transcription factor 2 (TEAD2) mRNA, leading to repression of medium-chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase (ACADM) expression and subsequent mitochondrial dysfunction, thereby exacerbating kidney injury and inflammation. Importantly, both genetic deletion and pharmacological inhibition of METTL1 markedly alleviated the severity of AKI, highlighting METTL1 as a promising therapeutic target for AKI.
Paper: The m 7 G methyltransferase METTL1 promotes acute kidney inflammation by disrupting mitochondrial function, published in December 2025 (Article in Press).
The KI-ISN Early Career Researcher Award winners will be recognized at WCN’26 in The ISN-KI Editorial Fellows Session: The Best of 2025 KI Articles taking place on Monday, March 30, from 9:25-10:55 a.m. Japan Time in room 315.