Lab Overview

Makoto Miyazaki, PhD is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Nephrology and Hypertension at the University of Colorado. For more than 10 years, the Miyazaki laboratory has strived to find the underlying mechanisms of chronic kidney disease (CKD) complications such as vascular calcification and therapeutic targets for treating these diseases.

Cardiovascular complications are the leading cause of death in patients with CKD. Vascular calcification is a common complication in CKD, and investigators have demonstrated that the extent and histoanatomic type of vascular calcification are predictors of subsequent vascular mortality. Although research efforts in past decades have greatly improved our knowledge of the multiple factors and mechanisms involved in vascular calcification in patients with CKD, many questions remain unanswered and no effective therapy for vascular calcification is available yet.

Our overall goal is to identify novel therapeutic targets for treatment of CKD complications. In pursuit of this goal, we have investigated molecules and mechanisms that trigger ectopic mineralization and vascular toxicities in CKD. In the past, we have discovered that several metabolites (i.e., saturated fatty acids and bile acids) and kidney-specific proteins (i.e., TMEMs) as well as intracellular signaling (i.e., autophagy, ER stress and cell death) contribute to CKD complications. Our group currently focuses on the following three NIH funded projects: 1) the role of novel cell death pathways in the regulation of vascular calcification, 2) identification of novel metabolites contributing to CKD complications and 3) identification of novel kidney-specific proteins contributing to CKD complications.