A Queen’s University Alumni and current medical resident at Kingston General Hospital was recognized last week as part of the 2024 STAT Wunderkinds.
Caitlyn Vlasschaert became the first researcher from Queen’s University and the only Canadian in 2024 to be named to the Wunderkinds list, which is a nomination program that aims to recognize doctors and researchers on the cusp of launching their careers.
The awards are given out yearly to emerging clinician scientists who do not yet have a staff position.
Vlasschaert is being recognized for her research into clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential (CHIP) where she was one of the first people to explore the impact the mutation has on the kidneys.
She and her team explored the significant effect CHIP has in the promotion of acute kidney injury and disease after other researchers had shown the impact it can have on other organs.
“I went into this saying, hey other people have shown that in the heart, or in the liver, or in the lungs that CHIP seems to impair our ability to actually heal after these types of injuries and I bet that the same thing happens in the kidneys,” Vlasschaert said.
“So we were the first team really to show that CHIP significantly affects kidney injury and kidney disease.”
As a whole, CHIP was only discovered about 10 years ago in December of 2014.
Vlasschaert describes CHIP as a mutation in the blood cell that causes them to be hyper inflammatory, which causes them to be unable to regulate inflammation properly and in some cases, results in full blown blood cancer.
The condition leaves people at a higher risk of organ damage because these cells help both with controlling infection risk and with healing organs after injury.
Vlasschaert says research began with a focus on the impact on the heart before branching into other organs, and those results pointed towards the possibility of similar detrimental impacts on the kidneys.
It’s still a relatively new condition to the medical community, but the research into CHIP is moving towards testing for and potentially treating the condition, and she and her team have helped to move that forward.
“Either way whether it was really important at the kidneys or not it was important that we figure that out because this is just this rapidly evolving field,” Vlasschaert said.
“We’re now at the stage where I think for the most part we have an idea of how it affects different organs as far as the magnitude of effect and maybe some of the mechanisms, but we’re now at the time and place and in the field where we’re starting to think about if and when treating it, and how we would treat it is is sort of the next big question.”
She added that she anticipates with the evolving research around the condition, testing for CHIP will start to become more commonplace.
Vlasschaert came to Queen’s in 2019 and completed her PhD while working in her residency as part of the clinician investigator program, and recently found out she will be doing her nephrology fellowship at KGH.
The research conducted by Vlasschaert and her team was published in Nature Medicine in March of 2024.
