A research team led by Kyoto University said Wednesday it has prevented kidney functions from declining in mice using human induced pluripotent stem cells, an achievement that may lead to the development of an effective therapy for chronic kidney disease.
Kenji Osafune, professor at the university's Center for iPS Cell Research and Application, and colleagues are looking to conduct clinical trials two years later on patients who developed symptoms of the disease after kidney transplantation and on nontransplant patients within several years.
There are an estimated 20 million chronic kidney disease patients currently in Japan, with some 40,000 patients starting dialysis each year. Meanwhile, only about 2,000 patients can receive new kidneys annually due to a dearth of donors.
Under these circumstances, regenerative medicine employing iPS cells, which theoretically can differentiate into almost all types of cells, has been attracting attention.
The researchers established a culture medium enabling more than a 100-fold proliferation of nephron progenitor cells derived from human iPS cells compared with conventional methods and transplanted the mass-cultured cells into mice chemically induced to have chronic kidney disease.
Consequently, the transplanted cells to give rise to the kidney's functional portion "attenuated acute kidney injury," a cause of the disease, and "prevented kidney functional decline, interstitial fibrosis, and senescence" in the mice, they said, adding that the cells secreted vascular endothelial growth factor to treat kidney damage as well.
Highlighting the significance of those findings, Osafune expressed eagerness to "reduce the number of dialysis patients in the future."
The research was published in the U.S. biomedical journal Science Translational Medicine's online edition earlier this month.
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