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Experimental renal progenitor cells: Repairing and recreating kidneys?

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Abstract

Strategies to facilitate repair or generate new nephrons are exciting prospects for acute and chronic human renal disease. Repair of kidney injury involves not just local mechanisms but also mobilisation of progenitor/stem cells from intrarenal niches, including papillary, tubular and glomerular locations. Diverse markers characterise these unique cells, often including CD24 and CD133. Extrarenal stem cells may also contribute to repair, with proposed roles in secreting growth factors, transfer of microvesicles and exosomes and immune modulation. Creating new nephrons from stem cells is beginning to look feasible in mice in which kidneys can be dissociated into single cells and will then generate mature renal structures when recombined. The next step is to identify the correct human markers for progenitor cells from the fetus or mature kidney with similar potential to form new kidneys. Intriguingly, development can continue in vivo: whole foetal kidneys and recombined organs engraft, develop a blood supply and grow when xenotransplanted, and there are new advances in decellularised scaffolds to promote differentiation. This is an exciting time for human kidney repair and regeneration. Many of the approaches and techniques are in their infancy and based on animal rather than human work, but there is a rapid pace of discovery, and we predict that therapies based on advances in this field will come into clinical practice in the next decade.

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Sources of support

This work was supported by Kids Kidney Research, Kidney Research UK and the National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre Funding Scheme. Material supplied by the MRC/Wellcome funded Human Developmental Biology Resource is gratefully acknowledged. This report is independently produced and the views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NHS, the National Institute for Health Research or the Department of Health.

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  1. Nephro-Urology Unit, UCL Institute of Child Health, 30 Guilford Street, London, UK

    Paul J. D. Winyard & Karen L. Price

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  1. Paul J. D. Winyard
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Correspondence to Karen L. Price.

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Winyard, P.J.D., Price, K.L. Experimental renal progenitor cells: Repairing and recreating kidneys?. Pediatr Nephrol 29, 665–672 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00467-013-2667-5

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