1. Nat. Rev. Nephrol. doi:10.1038/nrneph.2016.126
Figure 3 Potential applications of kidney tissue generated from stem cells in nephrology
Figure 3 | Potential applications of kidney tissue generated from stem cells in nephrology. Patient-derived somatic cells can now be readily reprogrammed to induced human pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines. In the case of monogenic disorders, in which a causative variant has been identified, gene editing approaches such as CRISPR/Cas9 can generate isogenic corrected cell lines from the same patient to study the mechanisms of the disorder. iPSC lines can undergo directed differentiation in vitro to generate kidney progenitor cells, specific mature kidney cell types and even organoid models of the developing fetal tissue, including nephrons, collecting duct, vasculature and intervening interstitium. Such iPSC-derived cellular models of the kidney can be used to understand normal human development, to screen drugs for toxicity or efficacy, to discover and test novel drug treatments for specific kidney disease conditions, act as a source of specific kidney cell types for cellular therapy or as a source of renal cells for bioengineering approaches to renal replacement. These applications are presented from left to right in increasing order of clinical relevance.
Little, M. H. et al. (2016) Understanding kidney morphogenesis to guide renal tissue regeneration
Nat. Rev. Nephrol. doi: /nrneph