Engineering physiological environments to advance kidney organoid models from human pluripotent stem cells

During embryogenesis, the mammalian kidney arises because of reciprocal interactions between the ureteric bud (UB) and the metanephric mesenchyme (MM), driving UB branching and nephron induction. These morphogenetic processes involve a series of cellular rearrangements that are tightly controlled by gene regulatory networks and signaling cascades. Here, we discuss how kidney developmental studies have informed the definition of procedures to obtain kidney organoids from neering techniques have emerged as potential solutions to externally impose controlled microenvironments for organoid generation from hPSCs. Next, we summarize some of these advances with major focus On recent works merging hPSCderived kidney organoids (hPSC-kidney organoids) with organon-chip to develop robust models for drug discovery and disease modeling applications. We foresee that, in the near future, coupling of different organoid models through bioengineering approaches will help advancing to recreate organ-toorgan crosstalk to increase our understanding on kidney disease progression in the human context and search for new therapeutics.