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Bioprinting better kidney organoids

Nature Materials volume 20, pages 128–130 (2021)Cite this article

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Automated extrusion-based bioprinting has been shown to enable human kidney organoid generation with improved throughput, quality control and scale, representing an important step towards macro-scale kidney tissue engineering.

The promise of human kidney organoids for disease modelling and drug screening is widely recognized, but limitations around variability, throughput and scale must be solved before that potential is realized1. Nearly all kidney organoid differentiation protocols involve the directed differentiation of pluripotent stem cells towards nephron progenitors, followed by manual aggregation of these progenitors and culture on a Transwell filter2. Several protocols take advantage of spinning bioreactors to enhance throughput, but these protocols also rely on bulk cellular aggregation3. Kidney organoids cannot be grown beyond the millimetre scale, since their interior becomes hypoxic, leading to necrosis, and they also lack higher-order patterning such as cortex, medulla and papilla. Manually aggregated organoids are also both labour intensive and subject to substantial batch-to-batch variation4. Bioprinting offers the ability to precisely control cell deposition in three-dimensional space at speed and scale, representing a potential solution to these challenges.

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Fig. 1: The use of extrusion bioprinting to generate organoids of varying conformation.

Adapted with permission from ref. 5, Springer Nature Ltd.

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  1. Division of Nephrology, Department of Medicine, and Department of Development Biology, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA

    Benjamin D. Humphreys

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  1. Benjamin D. Humphreys
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Correspondence to Benjamin D. Humphreys.

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The author declares no competing interests.

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Humphreys, B.D. Bioprinting better kidney organoids. Nat. Mater. 20, 128–130 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-020-00881-5

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