37 million Americans live with chronic kidney disease. The science to treat it exists. What it needs is funding, belief, and people who refuse to accept the status quo. That's where you come in.
CKD disproportionately strikes low-income communities and communities of color. It is chronically underfunded — receiving roughly $20 per patient in federal research dollars, compared to $2,000 per patient for HIV.
Most researchers study kidney disease with the tools of the last generation. Dr. Lim's lab at Indiana University School of Medicine is doing something different — and donors make it possible.
Inside the Division of Nephrology & Hypertension at IUSM, Dr. Lim leads a research group unlike any other in the country. He founded the first and only cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) laboratory in the United States dedicated entirely to patients with kidney disease — a platform so novel it's opening a completely new window into how CKD destroys the cardiovascular system.
His wet lab runs parallel to the clinical work — developing peptide therapeutics like AP001 through 11 iterations of analog design, bringing a molecule closer each year to its first human trial. This is the kind of long, painstaking translational science that transforms a mechanism understood in biology into a medicine a patient can actually take.
The metabolic disease epidemic — obesity, type 2 diabetes, and the cardiovascular collapse that follows — is the landscape in which CKD lives. Dr. Lim's team studies the whole picture: the cardiorenal syndrome, the mechanisms linking kidney failure to heart failure, and the novel drugs that might interrupt that cycle for the first time.
Donors fund this work directly. Every grant we award to Dr. Lim's lab buys more time on the CPET machine, another iteration of AP001, another year of the ROCK-D study enrolling hemodialysis patients. This is your lab as much as his.
Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine. Attending Physician at IU Health. Before joining IU in 2020, Dr. Lim spent over a decade at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Gifts to VeraCura Health Foundation are fully tax-deductible. Every dollar funds Dr. Lim's research, patient access programs, and the scientific infrastructure that makes new medicines possible.
Thirty-seven million patients are waiting. Dr. Lim's lab is their best shot. Your gift closes the gap between what's possible and what's real.