Australian scientists create human kidneys from skin cells

By Park Sae-jin Posted : October 21, 2015, 16:48 Updated : October 21, 2015, 16:48
A tiny human kidney has been grown in a dish by Australian scientists using stem cells, a lead researcher said on Thursday.

The scientists from Melbourne's Murdoch Children's Research Institute reprogrammed stem cells and turned them into the most developed human kidney ever created in a laboratory.

The breakthrough is being seen as a crucial first step towards building new organs for patients in the lab.

Lead researcher Professor Melissa Little said the kidneys were still small, less than a centimeter across, but have hundreds of filtering units and blood vessels.

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 was quoted as saying by the Australian Broadcast Corporation.

"You can take a fibroblast (from someone with inherited kidney disease), make a stem cell out of it, generate a little kidney and use that as our model for their disease."

The engineered kidneys also appear to be developing in the same way as normal kidneys grow in a human embryo.

The study, published in the scientific journal Nature, detailed how Little and her colleagues turned an ordinary fibroblast skin cell into a functioning kidney.

By Ruchi Singh
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