Scientists use mini-kidney models to identify potential drugs for polycystic kidney disease

Scientists hsve generated simple kidney-like structures called organoids and used them to identify potential drugs to treat adult-onset polycystic kidney disease. To accelerate the quest for new treatments for ADPKD, researchers used pluripotent stem cells to grow organoids consisting of one or two structures resembling the kidney's filtering units, known as nephrons. To make the organoids useful for studying ADPKD, the scientists used CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing to inactivate PKD1 or PKD2. As anti...