Christoph Kuppe

Dr. Kuppe is a physician-scientist at the University Clinic of the RWTH Aachen, Department of
Nephrology, and principal investigator at the Institute of Experimental Medicine and Systems Biology.
He is a board-certified physician for Internal Medicine and Nephrology. He received his MD in
nephrology at RWTH Aachen University. His thesis focused on how glomerular parietal epithelial cells
(PECs) participate in the pathogenesis of glomerulosclerosis. Since then, Dr. Kuppe´s basic and
translational research focused on understanding cardiovascular disease in chronic kidney disease
patients with a special focus on heart and kidney fibrosis. He integrates state-of-the-art genetic fate
tracing, gene editing, single-cells and spatial omics, and a systems biology approach with clinical
datasets to identify novel therapeutic targets and biomarkers and develop targeted therapeutics. He
recently used a high-throughput single-cell RNA sequencing approach to decode the origin and
molecular constituents of mesenchymal cells in the human and murine kidneys. The origin of
myofibroblasts was a long-standing conundrum in the kidney research field and genetic-fate tracing
experiments lead to in part conflicting results. The molecular heterogeneity of mesenchymal cells in the
human kidney in health and CKD patients was unknown. His study, published in Nature, decoded the
heterogeneity of kidney mesenchymal cells. The data gives unprecedented insights into human kidney
cell heterogeneity and several fibroblasts, mural cell, and myofibroblast cell populations were
discovered. The differentiation process of fibroblasts to myofibroblast was recapitulated in-vitro using
primary immortalized kidney mesenchymal cells and dependent on AP-1 transcription factor complexes.
NKD2 emerged as a potential therapeutic, demonstrating how the single-cell RNA data can be utilized
to uncover the molecular basis of human kidney cells in disease, which informs the understanding of
the regulatory process in disease and potential therapeutic targets. Dr. Kuppe´s clinical research
interests are focusing on predicting disease progression based on genomic datasets and
cardiomyopathy in CKD patients. Furthermore, he is interested to leverage machine-learning
approaches using patient tissues and biomarkers combined with clinical covariates to enhance a
precision medicine approach in nephrology. Dr. Kuppe has been awarded by the University of Aachen,
honoring the best medical theses of the year 2011, and has received several prizes and honors for his
research achievements since then. He recently received two of the most prestigious fundings in
Germany and the EU and became a DFG funded Emmy-Noether group leader and received an ERC
Starting Grant (EU).