Stefan Somlo, MD, C.N.H. Long Professor of Medicine (Nephrology) and professor of genetics at Yale School of Medicine (YSM), was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his distinguished and continuing achievement in original research related to inherited human kidney diseases.
Somlo studies the genetic bases of autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) with the goal of understanding the roles that cilia and polycystin protein signaling pathways play in both healthy states and in the progression of disease. His laboratory has discovered nine human disease genes for ADPKD and related polycystic liver diseases, the first of which was PKD2. His group has used these discoveries to define genetic and cellular mechanisms underlying cyst progression, including the mechanisms by which loss of cilia suppresses cyst growth and how polycystin re-expression reverses cyst formation in ADPKD. The former studies have provided new therapeutic targets for clinical development and the latter have provided evidence that ADPKD is a curable disease.
Somlo is a member of the Yale Center for Genomic Health and the Yale Biomedical Imaging Institute. He served as chief of the Section of Nephrology at YSM for over 20 years.
Also elected this year from Yale was Robert Shiller, PhD, Sterling Professor of Economics Emeritus in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and 2013 co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.