Dr. Tomokazu Souma is an Associate Professor in Medicine at the Division of Nephrology at Duke University School of Medicine and is an investigator at Duke Regeneration Center. His clinical training in Critical Care and Nephrology has instructed the trajectory of his clinically oriented basic research program. The central focus of his research is to understand the molecular pathways of renal repair after acute kidney injury (AKI) at single-cell resolution with the goal of identifying pathways that can facilitate renal repair and regeneration to prevent the future development of chronic kidney disease (CKD) and improve cardiovascular outcomes.

Toward these goals, he studies regulated cell death pathways in failed kidney repair after AKI using mouse genetics and single-cell transcriptomics approaches. His lab made fundamental discoveries in ferroptosis, an iron-dependent, lipid-peroxidation-driven, regulated cell death modality. He established a new paradigm that ferroptosis is not a simple all-or-none response to injury but that compasses dynamic cell state alterations, ranging from reprogramming of cell state and loss of cell plasticity to death. Further, he showed the first evidence that ferroptosis is a sex-dependent driver of maladaptive repair after AKI. His research collectively pinpoints the significant possibility of leveraging endogenous female resilience factors against ferroptosis to improve renal repair after injury in both sexes during AKI in order to prevent the transition to CKD.

His group is currently working on molecular mechanisms by which ferroptosis survivors promote chronic inflammation and fibrosis through intercellular communications with renal macrophages, as well as mechanisms that govern impaired cellular plasticity in these cells in a sex-dependent manner. His group is also active in collaboration to advance clinically impactful studies in related areas, such as transplantation-induced kidney damage, ferroptosis in failed repair in other organs, and interrogation of human kidneys at single-cell resolution.