2001 AstraZeneca Young Investigator Award Recipient

The renal section of the American Physiological Society is pleased to announce that the 2001 recipient of the AstraZeneca Young Investigator Award for excellence in renal physiology is Dr. H. Moo Kwon, Associate Professor of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University. The purpose of this award is to recognize an outstanding young investigator working in any area of renal physiology or hypertension. Dr. Kwon presented his keynote lecture, entitled “How salt regulates genes: function of the transcription factor TonEBP,” at the featured topic session entitled “Hypertonicity stress: new sites of recognition” at the Experimental Biology 2001 meeting in Orlando, FL, March 31-April 4, 2001. Dr. Kwon received his AstraZeneca Young Investigator Award during the renal dinner on Tuesday, April 3, 2001. This award is presented annually at the Experimental Biology meeting and is made possible by the generous support of AstraZeneca, L.P., Wilmington, DE.

Dr. Kwon received his B.S. degree in Zoology from Seoul National University in South Korea. He then obtained a Ph.D in Renal Physiology in 1987 from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He received postdoctoral training at the Laboratory of Kidney and Electrolyte Metabolism at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health. He took a position as Instructor in 1990 at Johns Hopkins University in the Nephrology Division and is now an Associate Professor at the same institution. He has published 36 peer-reviewed manuscripts and has written 13 reviews or book chapters.

One of the unique features of the renal medulla is its high interstitial salt concentration. Hypertonicity, however, damages DNA and interferes with protein function. Cells adapt to the hypertonicity by accumulating organic osmolytes and upregulating molecular chaperones. During his postdoctoral training, Dr. Kwon and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health and Johns Hopkins University cloned transporters of organic osmolytes (inositol, betaine, and taurine) using Xenopus laevis oocyte expression systems. Because transcription of these genes is stimulated by hypertonicity, subsequent work in his laboratory explored the mechanism by which this occurs. His laboratory observed that an 11-base paircis-element, the tonicity-responsive enhancer (TonE), mediates the transcriptional regulation of the osmolyte transporters and aldose reductase. These investigators went on to clone the transcription factor, TonE binding protein (TonEBP), which mediates this response. Their recent work identified three separate pathways by which TonEBP is activated, i.e. phosphorylation, nuclear localization, and induction through increased transcription. Emerging data show that in the renal medulla TonEBP regulates transporters such as the vasopressin-regulated urea transporter, osmolyte transporters, and aldose reductase. Future research on TonEBP is expected to yield a new paradigm of signal transduction unique to the renal medulla.

The APS Renal Section AstraZeneca Young Investigator Award Selection Committee, a subcommittee of the Renal Section Steering Committee, included Susan Wall (Treasurer), Jeff Sands (President), Michael Caplan (Renal Section Program Committee), and Christine Baylis (Renal Section Program Committee). The Renal Section wishes to express its sincere appreciation to the Scientific Commercialization Skill Center (SCSC) of AstraZeneca, L.P., for its generous support of biomedical education.