Name: Yan Xie, MPH

Institution: Veterans Research and Education Foundation at Saint Louis

Grant: 2020 Pre-Doctoral Fellowship Award

Project Title: Comparative Effectiveness of Newer and Older Antihyperglycemic Medications in Chronic Kidney Disease

How would you sum up your research in one sentence?

• My research aims to compare the effect of newer and older antihyperglycemic medications on chronic kidney disease outcomes.

Provide a brief overview of the research you will conduct with help from the grant.

• With the help of KidneyCure Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, I will be able to emulate a four-arm clinical trial to evaluate the comparative effectiveness of the four commonly prescribed classes of second-line antihyperglycemics (SGLT2i, GLP1, DPP4 and sulfonylureas) on chronic kidney disease outcomes. The results of the study will provide real-world evidence of the comparative effectiveness of the four antihyperglycemics on kidney outcomes.

What impact do you hope your research will have on patients?

• More than 16% of deaths due to diabetes were directly caused by kidney disease. I hope my research will help guide the selection of antihyperglycemic agents and reduce the health burden for people with diabetes and kidney disease.

What are your career goals at the end of the grant period? Five years out? Ten years out?

• I hope I will be able to complete my Ph.D. degree at the end of the grant period. And I hope to continue working in the academic research field afterward. Ten years from now, I hope I will be able to offer support to junior investigators and guide them on the pathway of kidney disease research.

What inspired you to focus your research in this area?

• While the burden of some non-communicable diseases including CVD has been decreased during the past decades, the burden of kidney disease has been increased. Since diabetes is the major driver of kidney diseases, I would like to focus on this area and hope to contribute to science aimed at reducing the burden of kidney disease.

What are the major challenges to beginning a career in kidney research today?

• Thanks to the increasing computational resources, big data and development of methodology, nowadays are better than any time before to begin clinical epidemiology research on kidney disease. Personally, I think the two important components to begin a kidney research career would be having a wonderful mentor and identifying an important topic.

What advice would you give to others to encourage them to apply for this grant funding?

• This is a unique opportunity to receive funding support on kidney disease research during the pre-doctoral period. Moreover, it offered the chance to have experts from ASN to help evaluate and improve the research topics.

Something you may not know about me is…

• I used to think I would be a biologist. A small part of the reason why I chose to enroll as a biostatistics major is because there is the “bio” in it.

In my free time I like to…

• Bring my child out and play.