Design and strategy for manufacturing kidney organoids

Abstract

Despite a continuing increase in the number of patients suffering from chronic kidney disease, currently available treatments for these patients, such as dialysis and kidney transplantation, are imperfect. The kidney is also a critical target organ vulnerable to the toxicity of various new drugs, and the lack of a reliable in vitro culture model imposes a severe limitation on drug discovery. Although the development of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) revolutionized strategies in biomedical fields, the complexity of the kidney imposed additional challenge to the application of this technology in kidney regeneration. Nonetheless, the recent advancement in our understanding on the developmental origin of kidney progenitor cells and the mechanisms of their reciprocal induction and self-organization has boosted research in kidney regeneration. Research since then has demonstrated that kidney organoids derived from iPSCs can serve as a useful model for drug discovery and toxicity screening, as well as for disease modeling, especially in combination with gene editing techniques. Moreover, attempts at kidney organoid implantation in animals have suggested their potential as an alternative source of kidney transplantation. In this review, we summarize recent progress on the generation of kidney organoids, as well as the obstacles that remain.