Engineered Kidney Tubules for Modeling Patient-Specific Diseases and Drug Discovery.

ABSTRACT: The lack of engineering systems able to faithfully reproduce complex kidney structures in vitro has made it difficult to efficiently model kidney diseases and development. Using polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) scaffolds and a kidney-derived cell line we developed a system to rapidly engineer custom-made 3D tubules with typical renal epithelial properties. This system was successfully employed to engineer patient-specific tubules, to model polycystic kidney disease (PKD) and test drug efficacy, and to identify a potential new pharmacological treatment. By optimizing our system we constructed functional ureteric bud (UB)-like tubules from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), and identified a combination of growth factors that induces budding morphogenesis like embryonic kidneys do. Fina

SUBMITTER: Benedetti V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6085557 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature