Cellular and developmental strategies aimed at kidney tissue engineering.

Background: With the rate of kidney disease on the rise, and a serious imbalance between the number of patients requiring a kidney transplant and the number of available donor kidneys, it is becoming increasingly important to develop alternative strategies to restore organ function to diminish the need for human donors.

Summary: We review the current progress and future directions of a subset of these strategies which are ultimately aimed towards bioengineering a functional, implantable, kidney-like tissue construct or organoid that might be genetically matched to the patient.

Key messages: By combining the knowledge about normal kidney development with the rapidly growing knowledge in the field of cell differentiation and transdifferentiation, there is hope that partial or complete kidney function can be restored in patients with kidney disease - including genetic disorders, acute kidney injury, or chronic kidney disease - with tissue-engineered construct(s).