Shiqi Lv

Kidney researcher at Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University, and first author of a 2026 study tracing a chain of enzymes that switches on mTOR and drives scarring in damaged kidneys

Department of Nephrology, Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University (at the time of the study, 2026)

Chronic kidney disease often ends in fibrosis, a slow scarring in which working kidney tissue is replaced by stiff connective tissue. In the 2026 study led by Shiqi Lv, with Xiaoyan Zhang as senior author, the team followed a chain of four molecules. USP7 is a deubiquitinase, an enzyme that removes ubiquitin tags, the labels that send proteins to be destroyed. By removing them from KDM5B, USP7 keeps KDM5B stable. KDM5B is a histone demethylase, an enzyme that strips activating marks from the proteins that package DNA, and here it silences the gene for TSC1. TSC1 is part of the brake on mTOR, so less TSC1 means more mTOR activity and more scarring.

The evidence comes from two mouse models of kidney injury, where blocking USP7 genetically or with a drug restored TSC1, damped mTOR and reduced fibrosis, and from human kidney samples, where USP7 levels were higher in chronic kidney disease and tracked with how much scarring was present. The human part is a correlation; the cause-and-effect steps were shown in mice and cells.

PubMed lists Shiqi Lv at the Department of Nephrology of Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University, in Shanghai. No official profile page could be checked, so the current position is given as at the time of the study.

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