Meet the KidDO team
About 1 in 4 people develop chronic kidney disease during their lifetime. The goal of the KidDO project – one of the first five projects funded in ODIN – is to find biomarkers that can help identify people at risk for developing this disease at an early timepoint. Below you can read more about the KidDO team members
ANNA B. GRANQVIST obtained her PhD in renal physiology at the University of Gothenburg. She is a Principal Scientist in the Bioscience renal department at AstraZeneca where she leads pre-clinical projects and platform work. In this ODIN project she will be involved in selecting animal models and contributing with knowledge and advice in model design and validation of data.
IRA ASSENT is a full professor at the Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University where she heads the Data-Intensive Systems research group. She also leads the Big Data Analysis research activities in the interdisciplinary DIGIT Aarhus University Centre for Digitalisation, Big Data and Data Analytics. Ira is a co-director of the Data Analytics and Machine Learning Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS-8) at Forschungszentrum Juelich, Germany. She holds a PhD from RWTH Aachen University, Germany (2008). Her research interests are in data analysis and data management with a focus on effective models and efficient scalable algorithms. In the current project she will be involved in data integration from various “omics” platforms and application of machine learning.
KEN HOWARD is an associate professor and head of the Bioengineered Drug Designs lab at iNANO, Aarhus University. He has a PhD in Pharmaceutical Science from the University of Nottingham, UK and is his current research focuses on protein engineered solutions to the delivery requirements of drugs, with albumin the predominant drug delivery platform due to its natural transport properties and an ability to tune the pharmacokinetics with recombinant variants of albumin. Exploitation of albumin ligand binding and transport of lipophilic molecules will be used in the ODIN project for functional validation of metabolites.
MARKUS RINSCHEN is a physician scientist who obtained his MD from University Hospital Münster, Germany. He is currently an associate professor at the Department of Biomedicine, Aarhus University, where his research program focuses on kidney disease, proteomics, metabolomics and physiology. In this ODIN project he will address the role of key metabolic pathways activated in kidney tissue during the onset of kidney disease.
ROBERT FENTON obtained his PhD from the University of Manchester, UK. He is currently a full professor at the Department of Biomedicine, Aarhus University. His research focuses on understanding the role and regulation of membrane proteins in the kidney, and he has made major contributions to the core knowledge that describes how their altered function underlies various clinical conditions including hypertension and various ion and fluid balance disorders. In the current ODIN project he will identify protein signatures that are common amongst various models of kidney disease.
PERNILLE B. L. HANSEN is senior director and head of renal research at AstraZeneca, Sweden. She obtained her PhD at the University of Southern Denmark, where she is currently a visiting professor. Her main research interests are vascular function in normal physiological settings and in cardiovascular and renal diseases. At AstraZeneca she leads the strategy and the early pipeline of the therapeutic area, kidney diseases. In the current project she will be involved in developing frameworks between the project team at Aarhus University and the kidney disease team at AstraZeneca, alongside contributing knowledge and advice in identifying and validating novel renal targets of CKD.