#kidney function

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Computing Kidneys

Analysing kidney biopsies using a novel approach with unsupervised machine learning algorithms accurately classifies chronic kidney disease and predicts future kidney function

Read the published research paper here

Image from work by Joonsang Lee and colleagues

Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics and Department of Pathology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Scientific Reports, August 2023

I have to find the good in the world.

I am sitting in The Earl, a restaurant

and pub in Atlanta, Georgia listening

to punk rock music. That’s a long way from

home for this California girl. My just not

so long ago heroin addicted son can now

sit down in a restaurant and eat a meal.

When he was in all of his addicted glory, sitting down inside of an actual

restaurant made him anxious and uncomfortable. Now with 17 percent of his kidney functioning, he can eat a meal without railing at me to get it to

go. “How could I be so stupid to think

that we were going to sit down and eat?”

A few times he managed to go inside an

actual favorite Chinese restaurant in

Oakland, California he frequently nodded

off during the meal. The waitress and

patrons stared, but I sat there anyway

trying to ignore their stares and obvious annoyance. Like Anne Lamont has

stated, you have to look for those little things, meet people where they

are and somehow have a little hope.

Now on 15 mg of Methadone,he is on his way out. Ironic now that his body is free of abscesses, and he no longer smells because he is showering again, that he is a little late to the recovery party, but I am still looking for a little joy here. Not sure a wall would

Fixing Filters

We’re all wasteful. Waste products ooze out from almost every busy cell in our bodies. And eventually this unwanted cargo needs to be syphoned off and disposed of. Our kidneys filter the rubbish from the recyclable, and the first step in the process is carried out by a tuft of blood vessels called the glomerulus. Lining these vessels are tiny filter cells called podocytes. But these are often a weak point exploited by kidney diseases, and can be harmed by the very drugs designed to stave off further illness. To study kidney function, researchers wanted to grow glomerulus structures on an artificial chip, but struggled to reliably generate the crucial podocytes. But they’ve now overcome this barrier, by steering stem cells to develop into podocytes, pictured here in purple on an artificial surface. Now they can begin to filter out the most promising new therapies for kidney disease.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Image from the Wyss Institute at Harvard University

Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University, Boston, MA, USA

Image copyright held by original authors

Research published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, May 2017