Organogenesis forum lecture: In vitro kidney development, tissue engineering and systems biology.

Renal replacement therapy (i.e., kidney transplantation) represents the optimal treatment for end-stage renal disease (a condition which is expected to increase in prevalence). However, the demand for transplantable kidneys currently outpaces the availability of donor kidneys, a situation not expected to improve in the foreseeable future. An alternative route to cadaveric or living-related donors would be to engineer kidneys for allograft transplantation from cells based on concepts derived from current understanding of normal kidney development. Although the use of cells for this purpose remains hypothetical, recent research from our laboratory has provided strong evidence that implantation of kidney-like tissue bioengineered from the recombination of in vitro culture systems which model discrete aspects of kidney development (i.e., cell culture, isolated WD, isolated UB and isolated MM) is possible. These recent findings are discussed here. Pathway based system biology approaches to understanding the mechanism(s) of kidney development are also discussed, particularly in the setting of this novel and seemingly powerful xeno-based tissue engineering strategy.