Recreating Replacements

Is it better to replace a broken personal treasure with a second hand substitute, or make a new one from scratch? When a person’s kidneys – very treasured possessions indeed – become damaged, a transplant can be the only solution, but spare kidneys are hard to come by. Growing new kidneys in the lab could eventually provide a reliable supply, and in the meantime create a platform for testing treatments to reduce the demand for transplants altogether. When kidneys develop in the body, they form from two component parts. One of these, the ureteric bud, has been hard to recreate, but a new approach has generated replicas from stem cells (starter cells able to develop into any other type). These simplified mimics, or organoids (pictured, with different substances coloured to highlight the processes happening within), recreate conditions of the kidney to let researchers interrogate disease development.

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 from work by Min Shi and Kyle W. McCracken, and colleagues, Bonventre lab
• Division of Renal Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Nature Biotechnology, August 2022