The trail of a bio-kidney for the sick

A bio-kidney gives hope to people with kidney failure. American researchers have announced that they have recreated a kidney and transplanted it into rats, marking an important breakthrough in the fight against kidney failure.

Described in the journal Nature Medicine, the experiment consisted of removing living cells from a rat kidney using a detergent solution, leaving the organ only an envelope of collagen. The researchers then set out to repopulate this empty structure with human endothelial cells, which line the walls of a kidney’s blood vessels, and kidney cells taken from newborn rats.

A risky step, the difficulty here being to sow these cells in the right part of the kidney. Finally, the team transplanted the organ thus recreated into living rats from which a kidney had been removed. The new kidney then began to filter the blood and produce urine through the ureter as soon as the blood supply was restored, and no bleeding or clots were observed. As a result, “the prototype demonstrates that a bio-kidney can function, paving the way for the design of replacement structures for the liver, heart and lungs,” the scientists said.

“Further work is needed to refine cell types to improve organ function, and several hurdles must be overcome before testing in humans,” the researchers warn.
One of them, Harald Ott, of the Massachusetts General Hospital for Regenerative Medicine, said yesterday that “the goal was to help the millions of people with kidney disease, whose lives are being marred by kidney disease. dialysis ”. Indeed, “if this technology succeeds in being adapted to human transplants, patients suffering from renal insufficiency awaiting kidney donors or not candidates for transplantation could in theory receive new organs derived from their own cells in order to prevent the risk of rejection by the immune system, ”concludes the researcher.