Authors: Yokoo T, Kawamura T
Currently many efforts are being made to apply regenerative medicine to clinical renal diseases. It has been suggested that some renal diseases which maintain renal structure can be treated by infusion of stem cells isolated from the bone marrow or adult kidney. However such cell-based therapy cannot be applied to the treatment of chronic renal disease, in which renal structure, including the kidney scaffold, is totally disrupted. Therefore, absolute kidney regeneration is needed to rebuild a whole functional kidney de novo and eliminate the requirement for dialysis. However, due to the anatomical complexity of the kidney and the need for communication between each cell to fulfill renal function, the kidney has been labeled as the most difficult organ to re...