To help patients in need of transplants, artificial kidneys would have to function like their natural counterparts, but they wouldn’t necessarily have to look like them. With a new $1 million prize from the Kidney Innovation Accelerator, or KidneyX, a team of USC Stem Cell scientists led by Nils Lindström in collaboration with Leonardo Morsut are on a quest to build a kidney that resembles the real thing in function, but not in form.

“Nature has taught us that kidneys can come in an astounding diversity of forms,” said Lindström, who is the principal investigator for the grant and an assistant professor of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine at USC. “Whereas humans have two big kidneys, one of our largest mammalian cousins, the whale, has numerous kidneys working together and resembling a bunch of grapes. We aspire to follow a similar design in building an artificial kidney using human stem cells.”

With the ultimate goal of providing functional artificial organs for the more than 100,000 patients awaiting kidney transplants, Lindström and his incoming PhD student Connor Fausto teamed up with Morsut and his postdoctoral trainee Fokion Glykofrydis.

To read more, visit https://stemcell.keck.usc.edu/1-million-from-kidneyx.