Pernille Laerkegaard Hansen

About Pernille Laerkegaard Hansen

Prof. Hansen has over 20 years of experience in renal physiology and pathophysiology. She holds a PhD in physiology from the University of Southern Denmark. After a postdoc from the National Institutes of Health, National inst. of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases, USA she later became Professor and Deputy Department Head of Cardiovascular and Renal Research at the University of Southern Denmark.

Prof. Hansen has significant experience from the field of renal hemodynamics and thorough experience in in vitro and in vivo systems as well as translational approaches. Her main research interests are vascular function both in normal physiological settings and in cardiovascular and renal diseases and her research group use techniques from the molecular level, to in vitro techniques to the integrated in vivo level measuring continuously GFR, RBF and MAP in awake mice. The major aim of Prof Hansen’s research activities, in the academic setting, has fallen into three main areas;

1. calcium channels,
2. adenosine, and
3. aldosterone and their involvement in cardiovascular and renal physiology and pathophysiology.

She has many international collaborations and previously prioritized collaborations to Odense University Hospital and perform functional studies on freshly isolated human blood vessels.

Prof Hansen is working at AstraZeneca, Gothenburg, Sweden as Head of CKD, Early CVRM. The role as Senior Director at AstraZeneca includes scientific and management tasks being responsible for the early phase of the therapeutic area, Chronic kidney disease. Prof Hansen leads the strategy and the early pipeline, and she is responsible for new CKD relevant scientific projects and collaborations. Her interest in the renal hemodynamics has led to two recent collaboration projects on vasculature rarefaction in CKD and a newly established 3D bioprinted model together with colleagues at AstraZeneca and external experts. With Christer Betsholtz at Karolinska, they aim to understand the molecular drivers of vascular rarefaction in CKD by using single cell sequencing. With Jennifer Lewis, Harvard Medical School, their vision is to build a high through-put humanized vascularized tubular model that can be used for understanding cross talk between peritubular capillaries and the tubules. The outcome of the two projects will increase the understanding of drivers of loss of capillaries in CKD and inform upcoming projects on new medicine for treating Chronic Kidney Disease.