Overview
- Nature Biomedical Engineering published the work led by Núria Montserrat, detailing a preclinical protocol that integrates human renal organoids into porcine kidneys.
- The team reports scalable production of kidney organoids in batches of about 30,000, overcoming prior limits of roughly 100 per batch.
- Researchers used normothermic ex vivo machine perfusion to deliver organoids into pig kidneys, which were then autotransplanted into the same animals.
- Human cells remained viable and integrated for 24–72 hours without significant immune rejection, and the kidneys maintained normal function during monitoring.
- The study covered about seven kidneys with short follow-up, and a Spanish ONT-backed multicentre effort has begun testing implantation into discarded human donor kidneys as clinical use remains a longer-term goal.