There are 1.5 million cases of drug-induced kidney toxicity each year in the U.S. Among the usual suspects are cyclosporin and cisplatin, a pair of widely used chemotherapy drugs. Because both are considered lifesaving therapies, research into mitigating the kidney damage they cause is vital to improving treatment for cancer patients. Using a kidney-specific tissue-on-a-chip technology, researchers from Grass Center for Bioengineering at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the biotech company Tissue Dynamics have uncovered the mechanism that causes kidney damage from these drugs, as well as a treatment to prevent or reverse nephrotoxicity. The findings are published in Science Translational Medicine.
Using human tissue cells in a microfluidic environment that mimics the function of the kidney proximal tubule—a structure that is particularly sensitive to drug toxicity and often the site of the kidney’s first and most severe damage from nephrotoxic therapies—the team embedded biosensors to track the tissue’s response to drugs in real time. Professor Yaakov Nahmias, Director of the Grass Center for Bioengineering and corresponding author of the study, offers a simple analogy… Continue reading.