Developing Pro-regenerative Drug Therapies for Acute Kidney Injury

Key Personnel

Neil Hukriede (PI)
University of Pittsburgh

Alan Davidson (PI)
University of Auckland

Project Description

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a major health problem and there are currently no effective treatments. We have identified a novel class of compounds (PTBA) that reduce AKI injury when administered days after the initiating injury. However, how PTBA prevents kidney injury remains unclear. Our goal is to use human kidney organoids generated from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) as a tool to understand the pro-regenerative mechanism-of-action of PTBA analogs during kidney injury and repair, and to further validate the kidney organoid system as a pre-clinical drug screening platform.