Vipul C. Chitalia MD, PhD

Professor, Nephrology

Graduate Faculty (Primary Mentor of Grad Students)

650 Albany St | (617) 414-1773
Vipul Chitalia
Sections

Nephrology

Centers

Whitaker Cardiovascular Institute

Evans Center for Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research

Biography

Our laboratory focuses on the role of post-translational modifications of proteins, especially polyubiquitnation of the key mediators of vascular pathologies in diseases such as cancer and renal failure. While these diseases are discrete, several fundamental biological processes remain similar. Through a highly collaborative network, our laboratory harnesses the power of various cellular and molecular biological tools, relevant animal models (zebrafish and mice), computational methods and machine-learning techniques and strives to validate these findings and hypotheses in humanized models or human samples from large data bases, which highlights the translational nature of our approach.

A. Vascular diseases in kidney failure: Close to 20 million Americans or 10% of US population suffer from the chronic kidney disease (CKD). Among plethora of cardiovascular manifestations, CKD patients are particularly at high risk for both venous and arterial thrombosis, especially after vascular injury (endovascular injury such as angioplasty or stents; and surgical injury such as arteriovenous fistula creation) in CKD patients. This area of CKD management warrants urgent investigation due to lack of risk predictors and CKD-specific therapeutic targets.
Renal failure results in the retention of several chemical compounds, which unleash cellular toxicity, and hence called uremic solutes/toxins. While investigating the molecular pathogenesis of uremic toxicity, our laboratory was the first to demonstrate the prothrombotic propensity of indolic uremic solutes, which inhibits the ubiquitination of tissue factor, a bona fide member of the extrinsic coagulation pathway. Further investigation revealed Aryl Hydrocarbon Receptor (AHR) pathway as a critical mediator of tissue factor ubiquitination and thrombosis. Leveraging the ligand and the mediator, our lab aims to gain a deeper understanding into the mechanism of this unique uremic thrombosis axis (uremic solutes- AHR- TF- thrombosis) and to develop biomarkers and novel compounds to improve the management of the CKD patients with thrombosis after interventions in various vascular beds including coronary artery and arteriovenous fistula, etc.
Thrombosis being a dynamic and the multicomponent process, our laboratory has taken a holistic approach, under the co-directorship of Drs. Chitalia and Ravid, the Department of Medicine of BUSM and established a Thrombosis and Hemostasis ARC, which is a multidisciplinary platform of cell and molecular biologists, clinicians (cardiologists, vascular medicine, nephrologists and hematologists), computational biologists, biomedical engineers and statisticians and mathematicians to investigate various facets of thrombosis. http://www.bumc.bu.edu/evanscenteribr/the-arcs/the-arcs/

B. Angiogenesis: Angiogenesis, a process of generation of novel blood vessel is fundamental during the development and in various diseases such as cancer. Wnt signaling, a highly conserved oncogenic pathway is critical in angiogenesis. Beta catenin is the prime mediator of Wnt activation. Focusing on the ubiquitination and proteasomal degradation of beta catenin, our previous work had described Jade-1, as an E3 ligases of wild-type beta catenin. Our recent efforts have specifically focused on c-Cbl as an E3 ligase for the mutant beta catenin and for the transcriptionally active beta catenin in the nucleus. These two species of beta catenin, once considered resistant to degradation are effectively downregulated by c-Cbl. Thus, c-Cbl is a unique E3 ligase of tumorigenic beta catenin, which is involved in several cancers including colorectal cancer pathogenesis. Leveraging the cancer animal models and human cancer samples including machine learning based quantitative histology! techniques, our group investigates the colorectal cancer pathogenesis to gain deeper understanding of the role of E3 ligases of beta catenin E3 ligases in various cancers.

Education

MD, Seth G.S. Medical College

MBBS, Lokmanya Tilak Medical College and Hospital

Molecular Medicine, PhD, Boston University School of Medicine

DM, Seth G.S. Medical College

Publications

Published on 2/9/2024

Lin W, Mousavi F, Blum BC, Heckendorf CF, Moore J, Lampl N, McComb M, Kotelnikov S, Yin W, Rabhi N, Layne MD, Kozakov D, Chitalia VC, Emili A. Corrigendum: Integrated metabolomics and proteomics reveal biomarkers associated with hemodialysis in end-stage kidney disease. Front Pharmacol. 2024; 15:1376058. PMID: 38405670.

Published on 1/17/2024

Smeds MR, Cheng TW, King E, Williams M, Farber A, Chitalia VC, Siracuse JJ. Characterization of long-term survival in Medicare patients undergoing arteriovenous hemodialysis access. J Vasc Surg. 2024 Jan 17. PMID: 38237702.

Published on 1/5/2024

Lotfollahzadeh S, Yang X, Wu Wong DJ, Han J, Seta F, Ganguli S, Jose A, Ravid K, Chitalia VC. Venous Thrombosis Assay in a Mouse Model of Cancer. J Vis Exp. 2024 Jan 05; (203). PMID: 38251710.

Published on 12/16/2023

Zhu M, Arinze N, Buitron de la Vega P, Alonso A, Levin S, Farber A, King E, Kobzeva-Herzog A, Chitalia VC, Siracuse JJ. High Prevalence of Adverse Social Determinants of Health in Dialysis Access Creation Patients in a Safety-Net Setting. Ann Vasc Surg. 2024 Mar; 100:31-38. PMID: 38110081.

Published on 11/27/2023

Lin W, Mousavi F, Blum BC, Heckendorf CF, Moore J, Lampl N, McComb M, Kotelnikov S, Yin W, Rabhi N, Layne MD, Kozakov D, Chitalia VC, Emili A. Integrated metabolomics and proteomics reveal biomarkers associated with hemodialysis in end-stage kidney disease. Front Pharmacol. 2023; 14:1243505. PMID: 38089059.

Published on 9/22/2023

Levin SR, Alonso A, Salazar ED, Farber A, Chitalia VC, King EG, Cheng TW, Siracuse JJ. Recent evaluation by nephrologists is associated with decreased incidence of tunneled dialysis catheter being used at the time of first arteriovenous access creation. J Vasc Surg. 2024 Jan; 79(1):128-135. PMID: 37742733.

Published on 9/5/2023

Belghasem M, Yin W, Lotfollahzadeh S, Yang X, Meyer RD, Napoleon MA, Sellinger IE, Vazirani A, Metrikova E, Jose A, Zhebrun A, Whelan SA, Lee N, Rahimi N, Chitalia VC. Tryptophan Metabolites Target Transmembrane and Immunoglobulin Domain-Containing 1 Signaling to Augment Renal Tubular Injury. Am J Pathol. 2023 Oct; 193(10):1501-1516. PMID: 37676196.

Published on 6/17/2023

Idrees N, Haroon S, Zhang Y, Mangio JC, Siracuse JJ, Francis JM, Ganguli S, Daly K, Diamond M, Vilvendhan R, Cabral H, Dember LM, Farber A, Kolachalama VB, Chitalia VC. Contrast Venography Versus Intravenous Ultrasound in Hemodialysis Arteriovenous Access Dysfunction. Kidney Int Rep. 2023 Sep; 8(9):1887-1891. PMID: 37705907.

Published on 6/8/2023

Budbazar E, Sulser Ponce De Leon S, Tsukahara Y, Liu H, Huangfu Y, Wang Y, Seabra PM, Yang X, Goodman JB, Wan X, Chitalia V, Han J, Seta F. Redox Dysregulation of Vascular Smooth Muscle Sirtuin-1 in Thoracic Aortic Aneurysm in Marfan Syndrome. Arterioscler Thromb Vasc Biol. 2023 Aug; 43(8):e339-e357. PMID: 37288573.

Published on 6/1/2023

Martens KL, Li A, La J, May SB, Swinnerton KN, Tosi H, Elbers DC, Do NV, Brophy MT, Gaziano JM, Lotfollahzadeh S, Chitalia V, Ravid K, Fillmore NR. Epidemiology of Cancer-Associated Venous Thromboembolism in Patients With Solid and Hematologic Neoplasms in the Veterans Affairs Health Care System. JAMA Netw Open. 2023 Jun 01; 6(6):e2317945. PMID: 37306999.

View full list of 113 publications.