Matthias Kretzler, M.D.

Professor, Internal Medicine
Research Professor, Computational Medicine and Biology
University of Michigan

Email: kretzler@umich.edu

Dr. Matthias Kretzler graduated from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He completed his internal medicine residency and a nephrology fellowship at the University of Munich, Germany. He is a past research fellow in physiology and nephrology at the University of Michigan, and has a special interest in the diagnosis and management of glomerular diseases and diabetic kidney disease. Dr. Kretzler is a Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis Professor of Internal Medicine/Nephrology and Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics.

The overarching goal of Dr. Kretzler’s research team is to define renal failure in mechanistic terms and use this knowledge for targeted therapeutic interventions. To reach this goal, he has developed a translational research pipeline centered on integrated systems and biology analysis of renal disease. He leads the Nephrotic Syndrome Research Network (Neptune) in the Rare Disease Clinical Research Network II, the coordinating center of the CureGN research network. He serves as the Director of the Applied Systems Biology Core at the Michigan Kidney Center and also works in the NIH Acceleration of Medicine (AMP) program in autoimmunity.

He has 20 years of experience in integration of bioinformatics, molecular and clinical approaches, and has published more than 230 papers. He and his team perform data integration of large-scale data sets in international multi-disciplinary research networks in the U.S., Europe and China. These studies involve carefully monitored environmental exposures, genetic predispositions, epigenetic markers, transcriptional networks, proteomic profiles, metabolic fingerprints, digital histological biopsy archive and prospective clinical disease characterization. The molecular mechanism identified in these studies has resulted in new disease predictors and the first successful Phase II trial of a novel therapy in diabetic kidney disease in two decades.

Selected Publications

Luan F, Trillsch F, Henger A, Eichinger F, Norman S, Appelman H, Kretzler M: A Pilot Study of Gene Expression Based Catagorization of Pancreas Transplant Biopsies. Transplantation, in press.

Sanchez-Nino MD, Sanz AB, Ihalmo P, Lassila M, Holthofer H, Mezzano S, Aros C, Groop PH, Saleem MA, Mathieson PW, Langham R, Kretzler M, Nair V, Lemley K, Nelson RG, Mervaala E, Mattinzoli D, Rastaldi MP, Ruiz-Ortega M, Martin-Ventura JL, Egido J, Ortiz A: The MIF receptor CD74 in diabetic podocyte injury. J Am Soc Nephrol, in press.

Tian Y, Patel JM, Nair V, Martini S, Kretzler M: “Periscope/GQ: A Graph Querying Toolkit.” In the 34th International Conference on Very Large Databases. Auckland , New Zealand , August 24-30, 2008 , demo paper (in press).

Lindenmeyer MT , Rastaldi MP, Ikehata M, Neusser MA, Kretzler M, Cohen CD, Schlondorff D: Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress is Induced by Proteinuria in Human Diabetic Nephropathy and Minimal Change Disease. J Am Soc Nephrol, in press.

Raffetseder U, Rauen T, Djudjaj S, Kretzler M, En-Nia A, Tacke F, Zimmerman HW, Nelson PJ, Frye BC, Floege J, Stefanidis I, Weber C, Mertens PR: Differential regulation of chemokine CCL5 expression in monocytes/macrophages and renal cells by Y-box protein-1. epub PMID, 18800033, 2008

Zhang H, Saha J, Byun J, Schin M, Lorenz M, Kennedy RT, Kretzler M, Feldman EL, Pennathur S, Brosius 3rd FC: Rosiglitazone Reduces Renal and Plasma Markers of Oxidative Injury and Reverses Urinary Metabolite Abnormalities in the Amelioration of Diabetic Nephropathy. Am J Physiol Renal Physiol, epub PMID, 18667486, 2008

Cohen CD, Lindenmeyer MT, Eichinger F, Hahn A, Seifert M, Moll AG, Schmid H, Kiss E, Grone E, Grone HJ, Kretzler M, Werner T, Nelson PJ: Improved elucidation of biological processes linked to diabetic nephropathy by single probe-based microarray data analysis. PLoS ONE, 13, e2937, 2008.

Martini S, Eichinger F, Nair V, Kretzler M: Defining human diabetic nephropathy on the molecular level: Integration of transcriptomic profiles with biological knowledge. Rev Endocr Metab Disord, epub PMID: 18704688, 2008

Wiggin TD, Kretzler M, Pennathur S, Sullivan KA, Brosius FC, Feldman EL: Rosiglitazone Treatment Reduces Diabetic Nephropathy in STZ Treated DBA/2J Mice. Endocrinology, epub, PMID, 18583417, 2008.

Neusser MA, Lindenmeyer MT , Kretzler M, Cohen CD: Genomic analysis in nephrology –towards systems biology and systematic medicine? Nephrol Ther, epub, PMID18586598, 2008.

Shi X, Qu H, Kretzler M, Wu C: The roles of PINCH-2 in regulation of glomerular cell shape change and fibronectin matrix deposition. Am J Physiol Renal Physiol, 295, F253-63, 2008.

Lorz C, Benito-Marin A, Boucherot A, Ucero AC, Rastaldi MP, Henger A, Armelloni S, Santamaria B,Berthier CC, Kretzler M*, Egido J, Ortiz A* (*corresponding authors): Apoptosis gene expression in human diabetic nephropathy: focus on TRAIL. J Am Soc Nephrol, 19, 904-14, 2008.