About 1.9 million Canadians have chronic kidney disease, according to the Kidney Foundation of Canada. Most don’t know it, however, since the symptoms of kidney disease are silent for a long period of time.
“Kidney disease is a serious and increasingly common medical problem. Patients who suffer kidney failure need dialysis or even a kidney transplant to stay alive. But waiting lists for kidney transplants are very long in Canada—as long as eight years in some provinces. Tragically, a significant number of people on the lists die before they receive a kidney.
Kidney development
Heritage Senior Scholar Dr. Peter Vize researches kidney development and function, the role of genes in inherited kidney disease, and the formation of organs (organogenesis). He explores basic questions about how cells learn that they are to form a kidney, and how they respond to this information and activate the appropriate gene-expression patterns.The kidney has been used as a model for studying organogenesis for many years, but usually through the study of mice. Dr. Vize argues that amphibians have various advantages for studying early embryonic development. He and his colleagues are able to perform experiments in frog embryos that would be impossible to do in humans or, indeed, in any mammal. “In a mammal you can’t just look into a kidney and see what’s going on. You have to do an operation,” he explains. “The frog embryo is transparent. The kidney lies right below the skin and is easy to see in the large embryos. You can see what’s going on in a tadpole embryo within a couple of days.”
Advantages
Another advantage is that the lab can generate thousands of embryos at a time, since the frogs need little persuasion to mate. Dr. Vize and his team can observe the early development of the kidney in a simple saline solution. The frog embryos develop very quickly, so lab members can study the effect of injections on kidney development within days. It’s fairly easy to inject and manipulate genes in frog eggs, and also easy to visualize gene expression in the tadpole.
“There are a couple of different things that we’ve uncovered in frogs that have subsequently been shown to hold true in mammals,” he says. “The lessons from the frog are relevant to all of us. It’s a great system with which to study congenital kidney disease.”
Care of frogs
In the course of his work, Dr. Vize has also developed expertise in another area—the care of frogs. His University of Calgary lab houses a large colony of African Clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis and Xenopus tropicalis). Dr. Vize has become such an expert on housing, rearing, and caring for these South African frogs that people from around the world visit his web site to learn about their care.
Dr. Vize, who came to Alberta from the University of Texas, hopes the genetics and kidney function research being done in his lab will one day lead to new drug treatments for kidney disease. “The Heritage Foundation provided a wonderful opportunity for me to expand my research program,” he says.
Credentials and publications
Dr. Peter Vize is a Heritage Senior Scholar and associate professor in the University of Calgary’s Department of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science; as well as the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the Faculty of Medicine. He also receives funding from CIHR and the Alberta Network for Proteomics Innovation (ANPI).
Selected publication
Vize P, Woolf AS, Bard J (eds.). The Kidney: From Normal Development to Congenital Disease. Amsterdam: Academic Press; 2003.