Xin Xu, MD, PhD

Professor
National Clinical Research Center for Kidney Disease
Division of Nephrology, Nanfang Hospital,Southern Medical University

Dr. Xu received his medical degree from Beijing Medical University (now Beijing University), and a PhD in Molecular pharmacology from University of Cincinnati. He completed a postdoctoral training in Genetic Epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Xu became an assistant professor in genetic epidemiology at Harvard in 2002, and the Director of Shenzhen AUSA Institute of Pharmaceutical Medicine in 2009. He joined Nanfang Hospital in 2014 and served as a full-time professor at the NCRC.

Dr. Xu’s research interests include the study of genetic and environmental risk factors in complex diseases, the development of new statistical methods and bioinformatics tools for genetic analysis, and more recently, the epidemiological studies and clinical trials for better risk prediction, prevention and treatment of cardiovascular and kidney diseases. While at Harvard, Dr. Xu and his colleagues have developed Family Based Association Test (FBAT), which provides a unified analytical framework and software tool for genetic association analysis under family settings. FBAT has become one of the most popular software tools for performing association tests for human family data. Dr. Xu’s recent work at the NCRC include air pollution and kidney diseases, efficacy of folic acid in delaying the progression of chronic kidney disease, and the definition for acute kidney injury in children. Dr. Xu has co-authored more than 90 papers in SCI-tracked scientific journals, such as Nature Genetics, JAMA Internal Medicine, American Journal of Human Genetics, Nature Review of Nephrology, and Journal of American Society of Nephrology. According to Google Scholar, his work has been citied 5547 times as of March 2018, with a h-index of 34.

Selected publications:

1.Xu X, Peng M, Fang Z, Xu X. The direction of microsatellite mutations is dependent upon allele length. Nature Genet. 2000; 24:396-399.

2.Laird N, Horvath S, Xu X. Implementing a unified approach to family based tests of association. Genet Epidemiol (Suppl. 1) 2000; 19:S36-S42.

3.Xu X, Weiss S, Xu X, Wei LJ. A unified Haseman-Elston regression method for testing linkage with quantitative traits. Am J Hum Genet 2000; 67:1025-1028.

4.Xu X, Fang Z, Wang B, Chen C, Guang W, Jin Y, Yang J, Lewitzky S, Aelony A, Parker A, Meyer J, Weiss S, Xu X. A genome-wide search for quantitative trait loci underlying asthma. Am J Hum Genet 2001; 69:1271-1277.

5.Xu X, Rakovski C, Xu X, Laird N. An efficient family-based association test using multiple markers. Genet. Epidemiol. 2006; 30:620-6.

6.Feng Y, Hong X, Wilker E, Li Z, Zhang W, Jin D, Liu X, Zhang T, Xu X, Xu X. Effects of age at menarche, reproductive years, and menopause on metabolic risk factors for cardiovascular diseases. Atherosclerosis 2008; 196:590-7

7.Xu X, Nie S, Liu Z, Chen C, Xu G, Zha Y, Qian J, Liu B, Han S, Xu A, Xu X, Hou FF. Epidemiology and Clinical Correlates of AKI in Chinese Hospitalized Adults. Clin J Am Soc Nephrol. 2015 10:1510-8.

8.Xu X, Wang G, Chen N, Lu T, Nie S, Xu G, Zhang P, Luo Y, Wang Y, Wang X, Schwartz J, Geng J, and Hou FF. Long-Term Exposure to Air Pollution and Increased Risk of Membranous Nephropathy in China. J Am Soc Nephrol. 2016; 27:3739-3746

9.Xu X, Qin X, Li Y, Sun D, Wang J, Liang M, Wang B, Huo Y, Hou FF. Efficacy of Folic Acid Therapy On the Progression of Chronic Kidney Disease: the Renal Sub-study of the China Stroke Primary Prevention Trial (CSPPT). JAMA Intern Med. 2016; 176:1443-1450

10.Xu X, Nie S, Ding H, Hou FF. Environmental pollution and kidney diseases. Nat Rev Nephrol. 2018 Feb 26. doi: 10.1038/nrneph.2018.11.