Dr Henry Wu
Kidney organoid to shake up care for the disease
Researchers at the Kolling Institute are making encouraging progress towards personalised medicine for kidney disease, an approach which will mark a significant improvement in care. The team from the Renal Research Laboratory, led by eminent clinician researcher Professor Carol Pollock has developed a kidney organoid, which can be grown from a person’s blood cells or urine in just 10 days. The researchers are believed to be the first team to have developed a kidney organoid from urine. Professor Pollock says their ground-breaking approach will lead to tailored treatments similar to the individual cancer care offered to many patients. “These organoids will be used to test personalised therapies for kidney diseases, determining if a particular drug is effective or toxic for an individual,” said Professor Pollock who is a renal medicine specialist at Royal North Shore Hospital and internationally respected academic with the University of Sydney.
“We will be able to test new therapies that come onto the market to assess whether they could reverse the damage in the kidneys or stop the progression of kidney disease. “We also expect to test whether drug combinations might be toxic to the kidney as we know that some drugs can injure the kidney. “In many cases, people with kidney disease take a lot of medications, and if somebody doesn’t respond well, we often leave them on that drug, and add another one. “We have a handful of medications that have been shown in clinical trials to be beneficial, and in some cases people are on most of these drugs. “But with this new ability to test medications, we will be able to see what works and what doesn’t, reducing the trial-and-error approach in kidney disease management, and replacing it with a potentially life-changing personalised treatment.” Professor Pollock said the development of the kidney organoid is well advanced and they are currently refining how
they would manage the testing. She anticipates its wider use is close. She said their work is an important area of research given the increasing prevalence of kidney disease. “More than 11 per cent of Australians have the condition which claims more lives each year than breast and prostate cancer combined. Kidney disease is a progressive disease which eventually leads to kidney failure and death, without dialysis or a kidney transplant,” she said.
Professor Carol Pollock
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