Australian scientists create human kidneys from skin cells

A mini-kidney could be grown from the cells of someone with kidney disease, for example, so doctors could run tests and better understand the individual’s illness.

However, their starting point was human skin cells that had been chemically transformed into a type of cell capable of becoming any other – a stem cell. A pharmaceutical company can spend millions of dollars developing a drug, only to discover when they begin human trials that the compound is harmful and has to be ditched.

Professor Melissa Little, head of the Kidney Research Laboratory at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, first grew a mini-kidney in 2013, forming two key cell types.

These are made using tissue from people.

It worked, the team reported in the journal Nature.

Researchers have perfected a method of turning human stem cells into kidney tissue. The patient wouldn’t need to take immune-suppressing drugs to make the body tolerate the new organ.

MELISSA LITTLE: Mini organs in a lab, yes.

The work represented “an important step towards building stem-cell-derived kidneys”, University of Edinburgh anatomy expert Jamie Davies wrote in a comment, also published by Nature.

“The structure’s fine-scale tissue organization is realistic, but it does not adopt the macro-scale organization of a whole kidney”.

For finding alternatives, Little and others have been, since long, trying to grow kidneys in the lab with the help of cells called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells.

“There is a long way to go until clinically useful transplantable kidneys can be engineered, but Takasato and colleagues’ protocol is a valuable step in the right direction”.

According to Davies, however, the organoids may already fulfill a completely different medical need, which is testing the safety of new drugs for humans. They can also be used as a source of cells for therapy and also utilized for nephrotoxicity screening, and disease modeling.

They started with a different type of stem cell, taken from the colons of babies that had intestinal surgery and from mice. One type of cell will signal to its neighbor, and its neighbor will signal back, and that actually makes them form the appropriate shape.

To test whether the organoids reacted to toxic drugs in the same way as healthy human kidneys, the scientists exposed them to the cancer drug, cisplatin, and found that they suffered similar damage. While not advanced enough to complete all the complex tasks required of an adult kidney, the researchers hope this study will lead to the creation of fully functioning kidneys in the future.