How to rebuild the kidney: recent advances in kidney organoids.

It is difficult to restore kidney function once it has become severely impaired. Although kidney transplantation is a curative therapy, donor numbers remain limited. Thus, the generation of kidney organoids (mainly comprising glomeruli and renal tubules) from multipotent stem cells represents an important advance in regenerative medicine of the kidney. Recently, a protocol that can generate the higher-order structure of the mouse embryonic kidney was reported. Kidney organoids are now being used for disease modelling, and may eventually be applicable for clinical transplantation. In this review, we summarize the recent advances in kidney organoid research, and discuss the issues to be resolved toward kidney reconstruction.