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
Andrew S. Beenken, MD, PhD, as a clinical investigator, seeks to understand the pathophysiology of proteinuria so as to better intervene against chronic kidney disease. His skills as a basic science researcher are focused in structural biology and biochemistry. As a graduate student, he learned X-ray crystallography, and solved structures of fibroblast growth factors bound to their receptors. He worked in a highly collaborative lab that enabled joint projects with many other investigators across the spectrum of FGF biology. Following clinical training in medicine and nephrology, Dr. Beenken returned to the lab to work with his current mentors, Jonathan Barasch and Lawrence Shapiro. With them, he has had success purifying from mouse kidney the endocytic receptor, LRP2/megalin, and determining a structure of this membrane protein at neutral and endosomal pH using cryo-EM. LRP2 is the most important endocytic receptor in the kidney, and as such, directly implicated in proteinuric disease. The structures revealed the mechanisms of human mutations in LRP2 that lead to proteinuric disease, and they also have implications for how LRP2 may interact with its co-receptors in the proximal tubule of the kidney. Dr. Beenken's results with LRP2 will form the basis for his career and offer numerous opportunities for translational research. He hopes to emulate the lab model of his graduate advisor, establish structural expertise in the LRP proteins, and work in a collaborative environment with investigators from multiple institutions on problems of kidney proximal tubule physiology.