“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”, says Little.
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Little and her team at Murdoch Childrens Research Institute first grew a mini-kidney in a dish in 2013 and were able to form two key cell types.
All the cells just organise themselves kind of like crowd performances and they all move around, find their friends, make structures and so what we’ve really done is just encourage the stem cells to do that over again and the cells move around and they turn into what they need to be.
“But the team have now grown an organ that forms all the cell types normally present in the human kidney”.
“Making stem cells from patients with kidney disease, and then growing a mini-kidney that matches the patient, will help us understand that patient’s disease and develop treatments for them”, Professor Little said. The process is complicated and challenging, especially in organs composed of a multitude of different cell types such as the kidney, which has more than 20.
“It’s like a recipe”, Little says. These are adult cells that are reprogrammed into a neutral state from which they can be developed into other cell types.
“That really is an amazingly hard task”, she says.
In general, an adult kidney contains about 1 million nephrons, the structures responsible for performing important filtering function in the kidney.
In the new study, Little and her colleagues report they finally found the right recipe to create kidney “organoids” – very small, primitive kidneys that are more like the kidney in a fetus. However, they said that the “organoid” may be useful for other purposes such as replacing animals in drug toxicity tests.
Their “organoids” are comparable to an unborn baby’s kidneys in the first trimester, and are not yet good enough to transplant into sick patients.
According to Davies, however, the organoids may already fulfill a completely different medical need, which is testing the safety of new drugs for humans.
MELISSA LITTLE: I think what’s really great is that, at this size and with this complexity, and this accuracy because it really is like a normal human developing kidney, we can do things with it now and that’s because we can make a stem cell for example from someone’s who’s got kidney disease that might have a mutation that’s caused their disease.
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Davies is not a member of the research group but has written a commentary supplementing Little’s paper in Nature.
