Kidney organoids—a new tool for kidney therapeutic development

Abstract

Kidney organoids, derived from human pluripotent stem cells, have the potential to greatly facilitate drug development. Boreström etal. have used CRISPR/Cas9 to create kidney fluorescent lineage markers for SIX2 and NPHS1 to monitor the differentiation process to tubular and glomerular structures and optimize maturity. The convergence of "personalized" kidney organoids with genome editing and single-cell sequencing technology hold great promise to result in better insight to disease, better human cell disease models, more predictive toxicology, and potentially "clinical trials in a dish."