Giorgia Jurisic Snijder

“It’s a small organ, but one we can’t live without.

Kidney disease is often called a silent killer, because if you have chronic kidney disease you may not feel it for many years. Your kidneys are slowly failing on you, but you don't know until your kidney function has significantly declined. And then things start going downhill fast. It's our jobs as scientists to work with clinicians to educate patients so they understand why it’s important to get diagnosed and start treatment as early as possible.

At CSL, I’m part of a team whose job it is to research ideas for potential new therapies and assess external opportunities from other biotech companies and our academic partners. Most of the time, my job focuses on cells and molecules. But what really motivates me is the big picture: what happens to patients with this disease, and what their life looks like. I’ve learned a lot about what it’s like to be on dialysis, which is a reality for many patients with end stage kidney disease. It hit me how burdensome dialysis is, and how much it affects patients’ quality of life. It can also cause cardiovascular problems for patients – even in young people. It made me realise that each year we can keep a patient off dialysis is extremely valuable and we should keep going in our quest for medicines that can make that difference.

My mother inspired me to go into science. She wasn’t a scientist, but she loved nature and from when I was a young age we would roam together in the forests and along the coast of Croatia – where I’m from. We would forage for plants with medicinal properties. And a question developed inside me: How do these things work? What happens inside us, inside animals, and inside plants? I needed to understand. So that was my path to science: Being inspired by the natural world and wanting to know how it works. And then later I wanted to understand when things don’t work, what goes wrong.

And that’s why I enjoy my role as a scientist in drug discovery – because my job is to understand what’s going wrong and how we can fix it. Our bodies, our cells, and the pathways that govern them are amazing. They’re so fine-tuned – you could say they’re a kind of perfection. But then sometimes something goes wrong and it's really challenging to figure out how to intervene in these complex systems and keep it safe for the patient.

There have been meaningful advancements for patients over the past couple of years – new drugs that show us what can be done and inspire us to go even further and do better. A major focus in nephrology is being able to deliver drugs only to those cells that need it and to minimise the exposure of the rest of the tissue. I think of it as taking a scalpel to the problem, rather than a sledgehammer.”

 

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