Prof Vicente E. Torres

Dr. Torres received MD and Doctoral degrees from the University of Barcelona and moved to the Mayo Clinic in 1972 for research training and residencies in Internal Medicine and Nephrology. During his training, he studied the role of prostaglandins in acute renal failure (in Dr. Cameron G. Strong’s laboratory) and the distribution and modulation of cyclic nucleotide phosphodiesterases in the kidney (in Dr. Thomas P. Dousa’s laboratory). He joined the faculty of the Mayo Clinic in 1979 and became Professor of Medicine in 1991. After working in the areas of primary glomerulopathies, reflux nephropathy and renal transplantation, he became increasingly interested in polycystic kidney disease (PKD) and related diseases and these have been the focus of his research for the last three decades. He has published on topics ranging from epidemiology, phenotypic characterization, natural history and clinical management of these diseases to identification of responsible genes, expression and function of the encoded proteins, and preclinical and clinical therapeutic trials. Translational studies and attempts to improve treatment options for ADPKD have been his major focus. He is a PI for the NIH-funded CRISP imaging study and the recently completed HALT-PKD clinical trial and for Industry-funded clinical trials of vasopressin V2 receptor antagonists, and the Director of the NIH-funded Mayo Translational PKD Center. His contributions to PKD research were recognized by the 2007 Lillian Jean Kaplan International Prize for Advancement in the Understanding of PKD. In addition, he has served as Chair of the Division of Nephrology and Hypertension at the Mayo Clinic, Director of the NIH-funded Mayo Kidney Disease Research Training Grant, and on the Scientific Advisory Board of the PKD Foundation and several editorial boards and NIH study sections and committees. He has organized a number of meetings on PKD, more recently the first Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) Controversies Conference dedicated to PKD and the 2017 FASEB Science Research Conference on PKD.