EUROPE: Adult skin cells have been reprogrammed to make the most mature human kidneys yet to be grown in a dish, say researchers.
The mini kidneys have hundreds of filtering units and blood vessels and appear to be developing just as kidneys would in an embryo.
“The short-term goal is to actually use this method to make little replicas of the developing kidney and use that to test whether drugs are toxic to the kidney,” said lead researcher Professor Melissa Little, of the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute.
“Ultimately we hope we might be able to scale this up so we can … maybe bioengineer an entire organ.”
In previous research, Professor Little and her colleagues created cells that self-organised into the nephrons and collecting ducts needed for the kidney to filter blood and produce urine.
They did this by using a precise combination of chemicals, called growth factors, to guide embryonic stem cells to develop into the different cell types.
Today, in the journal Nature, Professor Little and team report they have made a developing kidney from a type of skin cell called a fibroblast.
The researchers reprogrammed the adult fibroblasts to become ‘induced pluripotent stem cells’, which act like embryonic stem cells, and can become any cell in the body.
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