The kidney is made up of hundreds of thousands of blood filters that remove waste from the blood. These filters are connected to complex pipes which transfer the waste to a single larger pipe that leads to the bladder, removing the waste as urine. Our research replicates the complex filter and pipe systems so we can study kidney function and how this is changed in kidney disease.
Impact
Kidney disease effect 1 in 10 people throughout life. Unlike some organs, the kidneys cannot undergo regeneration, so people with chronic kidney disease rely on either dialysis or transplantations to survive. This is why kidney organoid research is so important, it provides a way for scientists to investigate how to help people with debilitating kidney diseases.
reNEW research
We have developed a way to grow all the major parts of the working kidneys from pluripotent stem cells, which we call kidney organoids. These can be used as a simple and reproducible model to study how the different parts of the kidney function. We can also take a patient’s own cells, turn them into stem cells and then make kidney organoids from them to study patient specific kidneys.
Image description
Kidney organoids grown from pluripotent stem cells over 1 month. The complex tubes are visualised with a mix of green and red structures showcasing connections forming integrated networks that represent the functional kidney unit.
Credits
Sean Wilson, Postdoc, Little Lab, reNEW Copenhagen.
