Djalila Mekahli
Biographical sketch:
Djalila Mekahli, MD, PhD, is a pediatric nephrologist at the University Hospitals Leuven, professor in the faculty of Medicine and leader of the PKD research group in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the KU Leuven. Dr. Mekahli’s research focuses on inherited kidney diseases, cystic kidney diseases and more specifically on early stages of ADPKD. The goal of her research is to identify early biomarkers for ADPKD and to unravel the proximal molecular events that are essential in the progression of ADPKD. She leads a large and a well-characterized pediatric ADPKD clinic (with longitudinal clinical, imaging and biorepositories database) and performs clinical research bridged to the basic science. Dr. Mekahli is the initiator and the principal investigator of ADPedKD, the global APDKD children registry (www.adpedkd.org) in collaboration with several pediatric experts in the field. The ADPedKD registry is a web-based database, including both retrospective and prospective longitudinal data from young ADPKD patients, with currently almost 2000 ADPKD children from all the continents enrolled. In addition, she is the co-chair of the workgroup for autosomal dominant structural kidney disorders (including ADPKD and tuberous sclerosis complex [TSC]) from the European Reference Network for Rare Kidney Diseases (ERKNet) and board member of the European Kidney Health Alliance (EKHA).
The PKD Research Group (coordinated by Dr. Mekahli, Dr. Rudi Vennekens and Dr. Jean-Paul Decuypere) focuses on the development and characterization of human ADPKD kidney cell models to better understand the cellular and molecular alterations responsible for the disease with the aim to discover novel therapeutic options. For more information, see gbiomed.kuleuven.be/pkdresearchgroup.
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