The most painful thing about being a hemodialysis doctor, treating end-stage renal failure, said Ken Inoki, the LSI's newest faculty member, is that you rarely have good news for your patients. With no known cure, their lives revolve around hospital appointments three times a week, for six hours at a time, which allow them to survive but give them no hope for recovery (due to the limitation of donors for renal transplantation in Japan). "Most patients see this treatment as the end of their life," Inoki said. "That was the main reason I quit as a clinician: I couldn't give my patients any better options. I decided to concentrate on research to help find a cure or establish a new therapeutic method for diabetes."
He chose to join a PhD lab instead of an MD lab, he said, because he wanted to understand basic science. Working under former LSI faculty member Kun-Liang Guan, Inoki's post-doc focused on cell-based biochemistry, specifically the TSC-mTOR pathway. Unexpectedly, it turned out that this very pathway was involved in diabetic renal complications, bringing Inoki back to his original goal.
Those years were "bench to bed," he said, and Inoki often remained at the lab past midnight. TSC-mTOR signaling was a red-hot topic, and several other labs were competing with Guan's to publish first. Inoki relished the challenge, he said, although he had to promise his wife and three children that he would not always be clocking such long hours.
When Guan moved to San Diego, Inoki chose to set up an independent lab at Michigan rather than follow his mentor to the West coast. " The weather is nicer there, and I know the science would be much easier with him," Inoki said, "but I had important relationships at the University of Michigan's nephrology department that I wanted to maintain." Inoki is jointly appointed as an assistant professor in Molecular and Integrative Physiology.
In more ways than one, Ann Arbor has always felt like home to Inoki. His father was a post-doc in pharmacology at U-M when his mother was pregnant with Inoki. "It must have been the food she ate in Ann Arbor that made me want to come back," joked Inoki, who was born in Japan. While he misses Japan (especially the fresh fish), Inoki says Ann Arbor is an ideal place to raise kids, with abundant parks and safe neighborhoods. He also relishes the opportunity to concentrate on his research.
In Japan, the pressure to work both as a doctor and as a scientist are tremendous, he said, and you are often not permitted to do research until you have finished an entire day at hospital.
Inoki says he is eager to recruit post-docs and students to begin working with him in his new lab at the LSI. He loves teaching, which he finds extremely stimulating.
"Everybody knows the big questions in TSC-mTOR signaling pathway, but nobody knows the answers," He said. With fresh talent surrounding him, he believes the answer may just lie within their reach.
