Mini Kidney

To learn the complex workings of a race car engine from scratch, it’s easiest to first study a much simpler machine, like a lawnmower engine. The two don’t look much alike, but the principles match up. In the same way, these three shapes might not look much like kidneys, but they can teach us a lot about how kidneys work. They are organoids – lab-grown miniature replicas of key organ components. They are often made from embryonic cells, but a new study has formed them from adult cells in urine, making custom models for individual patients possible, so new personalised drug approaches might be tested. Initial tests showed the organoids filtering material just like real kidneys (each one stained different colours to help reveal the functioning structures and their activities), and revealed that they respond to disease just like the real thing, so they could be a valuable tool for investigating disease.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image adapted from work by Frans Schutgens and colleagues
• Hubrecht Institute—Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Utrecht, The Netherlands
• Image copyright held by Nature Publishing Group 2019; reproduced with permission
• Published in Nature Biotechnology, March 2019