Jan Klocke

Jan Klocke

ISN-KI Early Career Researcher: Clinical Science

The ISN-KI Early Career Researcher Award recognizes outstanding research in basic and clinical science published in Kidney International (KI) in 2022.

Dr. Jan Klocke was named one of the ISN-KI Early Career Researchers for Clinical Science for his paper, Urinary single-cell sequencing captures kidney injury and repair processes in human acute kidney injury.

Dr. Klocke is a clinician scientist of the Nephrology and Intensive Care Department at Charité University Berlin. He completed his medical studies at the Charité in 2015 and received his doctorate at the Department of Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology and the German Rheumatism Research Center in 2017. During his doctoral studies, he used the flow cytometric detection of urinary immune cells to gain non-invasive insights into pathophysiological processes of inflammatory kidney diseases.

As a postdoc, Dr. Klocke expands on this approach. He developed a protocol for the analysis of urinary cells using single-cell RNA sequencing in a collaboration with the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology. Investigating urinary tubular epithelial cells, podocytes, and immune cells at the single cell level in acute kidney injury (AKI), his team demonstrated that urinary cells can be used to infer data informative about molecular expression patterns in a patient’s kidney without biopsies. Dr. Klocke hopes to build on these results to develop diagnosis and monitoring tools for AKI and beyond.

The ISN-KI Early Career Researchers will be acknowledged in the Editors’ Pick of ISN Journals: KI and KIR session taking place Saturday, April 1, 2023, 08:30-10:00 Bangkok time, in MR 110 ABC.