Chronic kidney disease results in 1.2 million deaths every year*.
Currently, there is no cure and the only alleviating treatment is dialysis, which greatly decreases the quality of life. Stem cell derived models of the collecting duct, the drainage system of urine from the kidneys to the bladder, provide a model to study some of these diseases.
Impact
The ureteric epithelium is crucial for kidney development and growth, while also becoming the collecting duct system that removes urine to the bladder. As such it is a crucial component to the kidney, and diseases of the collecting duct cause chronic kidney disease. Accurate models of the ureteric system are important to understand disease and investigate potential chronic kidney disease therapies.
reNEW research
At the Little Lab in Copenhagen, reNEW, we are currently working on establishing and improving the generation of collecting duct and its earlier stages from human pluripotent stem cells in order to be able to model a human kidney more accurately.
Image description
Stem cell derived ureteric epithelium (GATA3+,CDH1+ in magenta and green, respectively) kidney orgaoid with ureteric tips (RET+ in blue).
Credits
Louise Wildfang, Little Lab, reNEW Copenhagen.
* GBD Chronic Kidney Disease Collaboration. (2020). Global, regional, and national burden of chronic kidney disease, 1990–2017: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017. Lancet 395, 709-733. doi:10.1016/ S0140-6736(20)30045-3