ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2024
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
Aravind Cherukuri, MBBS, PhD, MRCP is a physician-scientist with clinical training in general and transplant nephrology in the UK and US, along with doctoral research training (PhD) in translational transplantation immunology. He is Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. The goal of his research, currently supported by NIAID-K08, is to identify renal transplant patients at-risk for premature allograft loss to facilitate early interventions. To address this, Dr. Cherukuri's laboratory focuses on fundamental immunological discoveries besides applying linear/non-linear statistical methods to analyze clinical variables for accurate and timely risk-stratification. They discovered that human regulatory/inflammatory B cells are best characterized by their ratio of IL-10/TNFα expression. This cytokine ratio falls with renal allograft rejection, predicts subsequent allograft failure, and serves as a strong biomarker. This work was published in JASN (2014), Kidney International (2017&2023) and Science Translational Medicine (2021). Dr. Cherukuri's lab is currently working to uncover epigenetic marks that underpin B cell cytokine polarization. They are also working towards testing the ability of this immunological biomarker to inform immunosuppressive management to prevent rejection and improve outcomes in an RCT. Next, they tested a novel hypothesis that SIRPα mismatch which triggers innate alloimmune response (“innate allorecognition”) influences renal allograft outcomes by genotyping a large patient cohort, and correlating SIRPα mismatches to monocyte activation, graft pathology and survival. Finally, in an exciting collaborative effort with transplant centers in Leuven, Vienna, Barcelona, Lyon and Basel, his group is leading a clinical study to understand the natural history of rejection, and to uncover the relationship between allo- vs. autoantibodies and allograft inflammation to pave way for newer diagnostics and therapeutics in renal transplantation. In the next five years, Dr. Cherukuri aims to obtain NIH-R01 funding to expand his collaborative translational research effort.