Establishment of epithelial inflammatory injury model using adult kidney organoids [RNA-seq]

Kidney organoids are emerging as an increasingly applied model system to hold great promise for transplantation to individuals with end-stage renal disease and as a useful tool for kidney research. Multiple iPSC-derived renal organoids have been established to understand kidney development and disease. However, few disease models originated from adult renal tissue with fully mature cell fates have been set up to recapitulate kidney inflammation or fibrosis. Here we created a novel organoid model that faithfully representing the cellular state of inflammatory response during the progression of renal disease upon TNFα exposure. scRNA-seq showed signatured inflammatory chemokines, cytokines and inflammation-associated signaling pathways were activated in TNFα-treatment organoids together with injury-associated markers such as LCN2 and CLU. Donor age is associated with TNFα-induced inflammatory reaction in organoids. Kidney organoids from young donors showed more transcriptional changes by down-regulation of TGFβ and extracellular matrix genes. In summary, we established an in vitro TNFα-treated kidney organoid model that representing the cellular state of the inflammatory response during renal disease progression and provided a novel tool for studying inflammation-related kidney disease and drug discovery.