Kenneth Lim, MD, PhD knows the statistics right off the top of his head, reciting them one by one.
Around 37 million people in the United States suffer from chronic kidney disease (CKD) — more than one in seven people across the nation. Over 800,000 patients have end-stage kidney failure.
CKD causes more deaths each year than breast cancer or prostate cancer, noted Lim, an assistant professor of medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine.
“It’s a very underrecognized public health crisis,” he said.
This fascinated Lim as a student and younger researcher, but the lack of targeted therapies for patients intrigued him even more. That ultimately drove him to train in nephrology, a specialty focusing on the diagnosis and treatment of kidney conditions.
Lim hails from London and graduated from the University of Warwick and University of Cambridge. He never quite narrowed his field of study while in medical school, finding interest in just about every subject the medical field had to offer.
Eventually, Lim’s family relocated to the United States, near Boston. He followed not long after and was accepted for an internship with Harvard University, where he worked while pursuing his PhD under a joint Warwick-Harvard collaborative research program.
It was then that Lim became more interested in nephrology through his PhD mentors, who were both physician-scientists in nephrology. Part of what drew Lim to pursue a career in nephrology was the spectrum of patient care in the field, which ranges from ambulatory patient care to caring for the critically sick in the ICU.
When the kidneys fail, just about every other organ in the body is affected. It’s not always kidney disease itself that leads to death; it’s what happens afterward. The leading cause of death in patients with kidney disease is actually cardiovascular disease, which is exacerbated by CKD.
“Nephrology is a field where you really have to know all of internal medicine,” Lim said. “I really enjoyed the variety that nephrology provided in terms of being able to treat patients.”
The goal of Lim’s research group is to alleviate the cardiovascular complications of patients with CKD, which led to his work at the IU School of Medicine, where Lim is a faculty member in the Division of Nephrology and a member of the Krannert Cardiovascular Research Center.
During his time at Harvard, Lim always attended the American Society of Nephrology’s Kidney Week Conference. Without fail, he’d run into Sharon M. Moe, MD, director of the Division of Nephrology at the IU School of Medicine, who would inquire about his interest in joining IU’s faculty.
This was no incidental meeting, as Moe tells it. She became familiar with Lim during a call about his research and spent the next several years seeking him out at the conference to let him know he and his work would have a home at IU should he be interested.
“Dr. Lim is a talented researcher who shares my goals of clinical translation in research,” Moe said.
When Lim’s family relocated to the Midwest, Moe was one of the first people he thought of contacting. She invited him to tour the school’s facilities in Indianapolis.
“I was blown away when I came to IU,” Lim said.
Among the things that stood out during Lim’s visit were the kindness he felt from the school’s faculty, the institution’s overall embrace of innovation and commercialization, and the many research accomplishments of the Division of Nephrology, which is among the largest nephrology divisions at any medical school in the country.
At IU, Lim founded a cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) laboratory dedicated to the study of kidney disease, the first of its kind in the United States.
CPET is a powerful technology that can assess cardiovascular functional capacity. As part of CPET, patients undergo exercise stress testing and the technology measures ventilatory gas exchange, cardiac output, and more. The technology is even used on the International Space Station to assess how zero gravity conditions affect astronauts, which results in effects similar to nephrotic syndrome, a kidney disorder, in patients on Earth.
CPET technology is currently widely used in patients with heart failure or respiratory disorders in the field of cardiology and pulmonology, but it is not used for patients with kidney disorders in the field of nephrology.
One of the primary goals of Lim’s research group is to introduce CPET technology into the field of nephrology due to kidney disease’s association with cardiovascular disease. The data provided by CPET testing could better assess how the cardiovascular system changes in patients with CKD, leading to easier diagnosis and prediction of cardiovascular disease in patients with kidney disease.
On top of his work with CPET, Lim and his research group also focuses on translational drug development with a specific emphasis on creating novel drugs for patients with CKD.
“There are very few targeted therapies out there to treat cardiovascular disease in patients with kidney disease,” Lim said. “Our drug development work leverages both our clinical and translational research expertise as well as the incredible support of the wider IU community.”
On an average day at IU, Lim finds himself pulled in multiple directions. In the morning, he might spend a few hours attending patients at the hospital. Later that same day, he’s in the lab leading his research group of over 15 people that involves supporting clinical trials to work in the wet lab. Then there’s his role as an educator, working with IU School of Medicine trainees including undergraduate and graduate students along with clinical and research fellows.
Lim, who was named to the Indianapolis Business Journal’s Forty under 40 list in 2022 and was named a recipient of a Young Physician-Scientist Award from the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2023, also has an entrepreneurship role rooted in pushing forth IU’s mission of fostering innovation through new startup companies.
He has been involved in supporting several IU spin-off biotechnology companies and has a passion for seeing IU become a national hub for academic entrepreneurship and supporting the development of Indiana’s biotechnology ecosystem.
Every single day is different, Lim said, but it’s part of why he loves being at IU.
“I’m faced with new challenges every day,” Lim said. “Some challenges are not easy to overcome, and it requires a lot of innovation. But I love being a group leader, to be able to motivate and encourage and solve new problems.”
