Dr. Kimura is an Assistant Professor of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine, the Samuel Bronfman Department of Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He has been conducting basic and clinical research on inflammatory lung diseases and allergic airway inflammation using a variety of approaches, including molecular biology and genetic engineering experiments, disease model experiments, immunological analysis, comprehensive lipidomics, pharmacological experiments using novel drug delivery system (DDS), bioinformatics, and multicenter prospective observational studies in human subjects. After 6 years’ experience as a respiratory and emergency physician, Dr. Kimura entered the PhD program at the University of Tokyo in April 2010. During the first two years, he received thorough training in molecular and cellular biology at the Laboratory for Molecular Biomedicine for Pathogenesis (PI: Prof. Toru Miyazaki) and engaged in a research project focusing a molecule with regulatory function for the lipid mediators named Apoptosis Inhibitor of Macrophage (AIM). Thereafter, he moved to the First Department of Internal Medicine, Hokkaido University (PI: Prof. Masaharu Nishimura and Prof. Satoshi Konno), the leading institution in Japan for conducting animal model studies of respiratory diseases and received training in animal experiments including tobacco exposure mouse model, LPS-induced lung injury mouse model, allergen-induce asthma mouse model. At Hokkaido University, Dr. Kimura was a member of the research team for three of leading airway disease cohorts in Japan, the Hokkaido COPD cohort, the Hi-CARAT cohort, and the PIRICA cohort, where he was involved in the outpatient evaluation of subjects, data collection and analysis. Through this experience, he had the opportunity to learn the principles and the methodology of clinical and epidemiological research. Concurrently with those, Dr. Kimura also was engaged in analyses in data science, bioinformatics, and deep learning. He started his postdoctoral career working with Prof. Monica Kraft at the University of Arizona in August 2019. During this time, Dr. Kimura engaged in microbiome analysis on mice with CC16-dericiency and also genome-edit project using CRISPR/Cas9 system on airway epithelial cells to perform the functional analysis of inflammatory regulators in the respiratory system. In addition, during the COVID-19 pandemic he demonstrated that allergic inflammation suppresses the SARS-CoV-2 host factor ACE2. In August 2021, Dr. Kimura obtained a faculty position and have also been involved in managing the laboratory study as a junior leader in the Kraft lab. Since joining Mount Sinai in August 2022, he has continued to perform functional analysis of CC16 and also engaged the analysis of the data from the U-BIOPRED adult asthma cohort to investigate the role of CC16 in asthma pathobiology.
Dr. Kimura’s study titled Club Cell Secretory Protein 16 Regulates Response to Viral Infection in Asthma aims to:
- Determine if CC16 regulates the inflammatory response including the interferon response and downstream inflammatory mediators due to influenza A virus (IAV) infection in primary nasal, proximal and distal airway epithelial cells from participants without asthma that are CC16 deficient and sufficient.
- Determine if CC16 regulates the inflammatory response to IAV infection in nasal, proximal and distal airway epithelial cells from participants with type 2 asthma in CC16 deficient and sufficient cells.
ConduITS is supported by NCATS of the NIH’s CTSA Program. Any use of CTSA-supported resources requires citation of grant number UL1TR004419 awarded to ISMMS in the acknowledgment section of every publication resulting from this support. Adherence to the NIH Public Access Policy is also required.
