Bio-engineered kidney successfully transplanted into lab specimen

As explained in Nature Medicine, on April 14th, scientists were able to rid a kidney of its original cells, repopulate it with stem cells, and show that it is now a fully functioning kidney that is able to produce urine by transplanting it into a rat. The original protein building blocks and outlines of a kidney are now known to hold the template that is needed to produce a new, functioning kidney. The discovery of this process may one aid in the alleviation of the shortening of the organ donor wait list, specifically, the kidney; in the presence of the kidney scaffolding, scientist hope that this process will be able to translate to humans. Currently, candidates for kidney transplants greatly outnumber the amount of possible donors.

At Harvard Medical School, scientist Harald Ott and his colleagues used rat cadavers as donors for the kidney building blocks. The kidneys were cleaned with a detergent that stripped the organ of its cells, while leaving the extracellular matrix intact. Afterwards, the donor kidneys were flooded with neonatal kidney cells that were able to grow into fully functioning, adult kidney cells. After the maturation of the cells, the kidney was able to become fully-functioning; once it functioned, researchers were able to then transplant the functioning organ into rats that had a kidney removed. The kidney then became fully functioning in the rat with the missing kidney. This is incredibly news in hopes that this technology can be performed in humans.