Making a kidney organoid using the directed differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells

Abstract

An organoid can be defined as a three-dimensional organ-like structure formed from organ-specific progenitor cells. Organ progenitor cells were empirically found to self-organize three-dimensional tissues when they were aggregated and cultivated in vitro. While this nature power of progenitor cells has an amazing potential to recreate artificial organs in vitro, there had been difficulty to apply this technology to human organs due to the inaccessibility to human progenitor cells until human-induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC) was invented by Takahashi and Yamanaka in 2007. As embryonic stem cells do, hiPSCs also have pluripotency to give rise to any organs/tissues cell types, including th..