Australian scientists using stem cells grow tiny human kidney in laboratory. This breakthrough is being seen as a crucial first step.
A tiny human kidney has been grown in a dish by Australian scientists using stem cells, a lead researcher said.
The scientists have reprogrammed stem cells and turned them into the most developed human kidney ever created in a laboratory.
Image of a mini-kidney formed in a dish from human induced plenipotentiary stem cells.
The three colours show the presence of distinct cell types within the developing phonephone.
The breakthrough see as a crucial first step towards building new organs for patients in the lab.
Professor Melissa Little said the kidneys were still small, less than a centimetre across, but have hundreds of filtering units and blood vessels.
Scientists grown human kidney using stem cells in laboratory.
Little said the work had multiple practical implications, allowing scientists to one day test for the renal toxicity of drugs.
And on a more individual level, to test for a person’s predisposition to kidney diseases.
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,” she said.
You can take a fibrillation make a stem cell out of it, generate a little kidney and use that as our model for their disease.
Australian scientists using stem cells grow tiny human kidney in laboratory.
The engineered kidneys also appear to be developing in the same way as normal kidneys grow in a human embryo.
Ultimately we hope we might be able to scale this up so we can. .. maybe bio engineer an entire organ,” Little said.
The study published in scientific journal Nature, and detailed how Little.
And her colleagues turned an ordinary fibroblast skin cell into a functioning kidney.
Scientists grown human kidney using stem cells in laboratory.
These fibroblast cells first re engineered into “induced plenipotentiary stem cells.
Which have similar properties to embryonic stem cells, and then chemically adjusted into kidney cells.
Little said the team slightly adjusted their growth formula to produce their most complex and largest kidneys yet.
These kidneys have something like 10 or 12 different cell types in them … all from the one starting stem cell,” said Professor Little.
What we had previously were little flat structures over the surface of a dish… Now we have an organized that is about 5-6 millimetres across.”
It’s starting to mature and the cell types are starting to do more of the functions of the final kidney.
