Patrick Walker, MD
Founder, Nephropathologist
Arkana Labs was founded on the principle that the patient is first, second, and always.
From the Archives
Our Beginnings
Arkana opened its doors in 2001 as Nephropathology Associates. Our founder, Dr. Patrick Walker, was an academic renal pathologist who began reading renal biopsies in 1978. For the next 23 years, he worked in university settings where he read biopsies, did research, and taught. Following his desire to focus exclusively on kidney disease, he opened Nephropath and surrounded himself with physicians and staff who shared his vision.
From day one, Dr. Walker had a holistic view of the work that we do. That pursuit of knowledge, never losing sight of the fact that what we are all here to do every day is to improve the lives of the patients that we serve and to make things better for the clinicians who are treating those patients.
That view led to our mission – to improve patient care by advancing understanding of disease and providing world-class diagnostics. The same one that drives us today.
Expanding Our Practice
Research, education, and innovation are hardwired into Arkana’s culture. Over the last decade, our curiosity, innovations, and growing team of physicians have all contributed to a constantly expanding practice. Today we provide renal pathology, neuropathology, and biopharma services to thousands of patients across the country.
Along with expansion came a realization that, while our mission and goals were still the same, we had outgrown our name. This led us to rebrand ourselves in 2016 as Arkana Laboratories, a highly specialized laboratory focused in the area of neuromuscular disease and kidney diagnostics.
The most important milestones were the people that came. Our hope is that everybody who comes to work here has a heart of concern for others.
20 Years of Service
Over the years our drive to create change has transformed our practice from a small renal pathology lab to a multi-disciplined esoteric lab focused on innovation and prioritizing patients first.
Leading the Way
We are actively working toward the day that our research yields breakthroughs that make our services unnecessary. Eradicating rare and common diseases is the end game of all of our efforts because patient health is foremost in our minds every day.
What we are building at the present is really the springboard for what we are going to become in the next twenty years.
Our Future
Our focus always has and always will be on the patient first. As pathologists and scientists, we recognize that the best way we can care for patients is by supporting their clinicians with timely results and specific data about their diagnosis.
At Arkana, we believe we are moving into an area of precision medicine, where we need to know the root cause of a patient’s disease so that we can know their prognosis, how to follow them, and how to treat them.
As the largest renal pathology laboratory in the country, we see so many kidney biopsies per year. Things that are very rare diseases, here at Arkana, they’re common to us. We see them every day. So for that reason, we are able to study some of these diseases that it just wouldn’t be possible to study if you were at a much smaller practice.
The focus is on identifying a patient’s disease at the root cause, to be able to offer a more specific therapy to that patient. We recognize that we will never be a society without disease, but hopefully, what we’ll be, is better at treating the diseases that we know.
The Arkana Story
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