Walter Klimecki, PhD
Assistant Professor, Pharmacology and Toxicology
Did you ever think your ancestors' genes could play a role in how healthy you will be during your lifetime? And how can identical twins with the same DNA sequence have very different risks for the same disease?
Walt Klimecki is working on research aimed at better understanding the nature of the individual differences that make us unique--and uniquely responsive to environmental toxicants and prescribed drugs.
Klimecki's research focuses on both real-world human populations and experimental models of human populations. He and graduate student Paulina Gomez-Rubio are studying a community in Sonora, Mexico, near Cd. Obregon, whose drinking water is environmentally exposed to arsenic. As a result of their studies, Klimecki's group published the discovery of a genetic test that strongly predicts which individuals produce extremely low levels of a particularly toxic form of arsenic.
"Genetic studies like this one are important to basic scientists because they give clues about fundamental biological processes like the way our bodies process the chemicals we are exposed to," Klimecki says. "These studies are important to public health scientists because they alert us to the fact that a population may not respond uniformly to a uniform exposure. They are also important to policymakers and government officials because they provide information about particularly susceptible sub-populations that need to be considered when 'safe-standard' levels of environmental toxicants are defined."
Klimecki's lab is also developing new models of human populations. Alicia Bolt, a pharmacology and toxicology graduate student, is working with 150 different cell cultures made from the white blood cells of healthy humans from the U.S., China and Africa. These cells can be easily grown in plastic flasks, frozen indefinitely in liquid nitrogen, and thawed for regrowth as needed. Klimecki says this system provides a look at the key elements that form the basis of person-to-person variation.
"It is only by understanding this complicated balance that we will be able to predict an individual's likelihood of disease, their likelihood of responding to a particular drug, or their susceptibility to an environmental toxicant," Klimecki says.
When he’s not uncovering the genetic mysteries of life, Klimecki’s interests include tennis, roasting, brewing and drinking coffee, and keeping his Standard Poodles, Angelina and Delphi, out of trouble.