The researchers from Australia and the Netherlands grew their “kidney-like structure” from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells – adult cells reprogrammed into a neutral state from which they can be coaxed to develop into other cell types.
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“What we have is the equivalent of a first-trimester human kidney”, said Melissa Little, development biologist at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia, and a lead author of the study. She led the research, which was published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. They perform a host of crucial bodily functions, including filtering toxins from the blood and regulating blood pressure and bone density. But failure of kidneys can take place due to a variety of reasons like poisonings, infections and other diseases.
“The problem is that if something goes wrong with your kidneys there are only two options and these have been the same for 50 years: You either have a transplant or go onto dialysis”, Little says.
“Our experiments show that the architecture and function of our lab-made intestine strikingly resemble those of the healthy human gut, giving us real hope that our model could be used as the backbone for replacement intestine”, Hackam said in a statement.
Talking concerning the new construction, mentor along at the University of Queensland, Melissa Little declared that mini-kidneys may well be created with the assistance of arise receptors which could be arrived at through human being skin often known as fibroblasts. Little said that these kidneys contain 10 or 12 different cell types in them, all from the one starting stem cell.
By “tweaking” their growth factor recipe, the researchers were able to grow these cells into larger and more complex kidneys.
“That really is an amazingly hard task”, she says. Alternatively, drugs could be tested on the lab-created organ to find which medications would be most effective for the patient.
The small kidney “organoids” detailed in the study are much like the kidney of a fetus.
“The really long-term application and the thing we’re all trying to do is to produce from a patient’s own cells to produce new kidneys for them”, he says. Whether that will work remains to be seen.
Another use may be in pharmaceutical research.
According to Davies, however, the organoids may already fulfill a completely different medical need, which is testing the safety of new drugs for humans.
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“The structure’s fine-scale tissue organization is realistic, but it does not adopt the macro-scale organization of a whole kidney”, Jamie Davies of the University of Edinburgh wrote in an accompanying commentary.
