Andras Kapus

Biography

He is Born to be a (multi)cellular physiologist in Budapest, Hungary, He got his MD at the Semmelweis University in 1986. He got mesmerized by research as a second year medical student at Department of Physiology, and here He remained after graduation to obtain his PhD in 1992 under the guidance of Drs. A Fonyo and G.L Lukacs from the (patho)physiology of mitochondrial cation transport. his main achievements is this period included the characterization of the mitochondrial Na+/H+ exchanger (NHE) and the Ca2+ uniporter, the first continuous measurement of of intramitochondrial pH and Ca2+, and the identification of the physiologic role of the latter (with G.L Lukacs) as a key regulator of the citric acid cycle. He continued with the functional characterization of a novel H+ channel in phagocytes, a topic that drove to perform a postdoc (1992-95) under the supervision of Dr. S Grinstein at Divison of Cell Biology at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto. He performed the patch clamp analysis of the new H+ channel and identified the functional differences of plasma membrane NHE isoforms. Here He also got infected with his lifelong interest – the question of how biophysical parameters such as cell volume, tension/contractility and surface charge are converted to biochemical signals and influence cell fate and plasticity. Particularly He sought to understand how cytoskeleton organization regulates transport and gene transcription. He moved to Canada in 1997 and became a PI at the Toronto General Research Institute (1997-2003) and the St. Michaels’s Hospital/Keenan Research Centre (KRC) (2003-present), and was appointed at the Department of Surgery (1999) and Biochemistry (2013). they investigated the organization and role of the cytoskeleton in the context of osmostress and of epithelial mesenchymmal transition (EMT), a key process in organ fibrosis and cancer. Currently we aim at understanding how the cytoskeleton regulates nucleocytopalmic traffic of transcription factors and thus phenotype, plasticity, particularly during organ fibrosis and myofibroblats generation. their main results include the description of cell volume-dependent regulation of Rho GTPases and a novel kinase cascade, the identification the regulatory role of cell contacts in EMT, the description of the two-hit model (contact-injury and the fibrogenic cytokine TGFβ) of EMT/epithelial-myofibroblast transition, the concept of site specific susceptibility to TGFβ and of acquired ciliopathy during fibrogenesis. He have published 127 peer-reviewed papers (>7500 citations), am the head of the research training centre and the Critical Care/Inflammation Platform at KRC and the associate vice-chair of research at the Dept Surgery.

Research Interest

The cytoskeleton as a cell fate-determining device