ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2023

Cary Boyd-Shiwarski, MD, PhD has had a longstanding interest in renal physiology, starting with her PhD, then MD and now a career in Nephrology. She is an Assistant Professor in Medicine in the Renal-Electrolyte Division. In 2018, she was awarded a K08 grant to study With-No-Lysine (WNK) kinases in the distal kidney. Human mutations to WNK kinases have been implicated in inherited diseases of hypertension and hyperkalemia. Dr. Boyd-Shiwarski's laboratory uses cutting edge methods to study WNK kinases from the level of DNA all the way into animal models. They have made exciting discoveries that answer fundamental questions. At the molecular level they have found that WNK1 facilitates liquid-liquid phase separation to regulate cell volume during osmotic stress, and recently published the results in Cell. Another discovery they made was identifying how and why WNK1 precipitates into puncta in both mouse and human kidneys during dietary potassium depletion. They termed these puncta “WNK bodies” and found that they evolved to help maintain potassium homeostasis. This work was published in Molecular Biology of the Cell in 2018 and in BioRxiv in 2021. Dr. Boyd-Shiwarski is excited to take their benchtop discoveries and translate them into patient care. To achieve this, she is working to establish a Center for Kidney Genetics. The Center has already provided a diagnosis to many patients with renal diseases of unknown cause. The next phase will be to identify patients with variants of unknown significance and apply her basic science skills to help identify whether these variants are clinically relevant. Dr. Boyd-Shiwarski's 5-year plan includes obtaining R01 level funding to maintain her research, and to expand the Center for Kidney Genetics to include collaborations with her pediatric division and other research institutions.  Being part of groundbreaking work in both the laboratory and clinic has been incredibly rewarding and she is looking forward to the future.