Professor Lori O'Brien Works toward Kidney Disease Cure through Nephron Progenitor Studies
Finding Genius Podcast
Richard Jacobs
4.4 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 24 August 2020
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Because studies predict one in nine Americans will face some level of disease of the kidney, understanding kidney development and nephron function is key.
Professor Lori O'Brien discusses her research into kidney processes, describing
- How kidney development progresses in utero and what are the two main type of progenitor cells,
- What are the stages of kidney disease and how effective are dialysis and kidney transplantation, and
- What are challenges to kidney organoid development such as how to rid the organoid of filtrate.
Lori O'Brien is a principal investigator and assistant professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Physiology at the University of North Carolina Kidney Center.
In this podcast, she discusses the focus of her work, namely to understand the development of a kidney to better understand what goes wrong in kidney disease. This work informs efforts to eventually manufacture a renal replacement, and she explains that scientists need to understand its basic biology as much as possible to do so.
She also explains the damage of kidney disease as well as the mistaken notion that dialysis treatment is somehow a cure. Rather, on average, most dialysis patients will only survive about five years because dialysis treatment only mimics about 10% of what a kidney actually does for the body. She then describes her work more specifically around pluripotent stem cells that lead to the two different cell populations in the kidney: cells that eventually make nephrons and those that make up the connecting duct system.
She describes challenges to each cell type, the complex specialization of the cell types, and how they work in the body along with the vascular and nerve network in a way that's hard to reproduce with organoids. She describes some advances therein and various ways they hope to problem solve.
For more, see her UNC website at med.unc.edu/cellbiophysio/directory/lori-obrien-phd/, and her lab's website at obrienlab.web.unc.edu.
Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Forget frequently asked questions common sense common knowledge or Google how about advice from a real genius |
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| 0:18.3 | Richard Jacobs has made it his life's mission to find them for you. He hunts down and interviews geniuses in every field, sleep science, cancer, stem cells, |
| 0:27.2 | ketogenic diets, and more. |
| 0:28.8 | Here come the geniuses. |
| 0:30.4 | This is the Finding Genius Podcast. |
| 0:33.0 | That is Richard Jacobs. |
| 0:35.0 | Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius Podcast. |
| 0:41.0 | I have Lori O'Brien. |
| 0:43.0 | She's a principal investigator, assistant professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Physiology |
| 0:48.8 | at UNC Chapel Hill in the kidney center. |
| 0:52.2 | So we can talk about kidney disease and |
| 0:53.7 | dialysis and transplants and all those, you know, wonderful things. So, |
| 0:58.0 | Lori, thanks for coming. |
| 0:59.4 | Hey, thank you. Thanks for the invitation. It's great to be here and talk about our research and efforts in the kidney. |
| 1:07.0 | Yeah, so what's your research about? What are you looking at right now? |
| 1:10.0 | So our research really covers a spectrum of things I'd say from the very basics of development in the kidney to understanding how do you make a kidney, what are the components and mechanisms necessary to make the different parts of the kidney. |
| 1:26.1 | And from that we can understand more about what goes wrong in disease, whether it's disease and infants or disease and adults and those different aspects and then you know when things go wrong |
| 1:39.1 | understanding the mechanisms but also from the perspective of development trying to understand, you know, if we ever want to have, you know, the idea of a renal replacement, could you ever make a whole kidney or could you ever make new nephrons in the kidney, |
| 1:54.4 | nephrons being the filtering component of the kidney, you know, how can we do that and |
| 1:58.9 | really understanding the basics of developmental biology are pretty key to be able to do that and have informed a lot of like recent efforts such as generating kidney organoids from pluripotent stem cells, essentially making little mini kidneys in a dish. |
| 2:14.3 | And, you know, being able to advance those types of studies, you know, we need to understand |
... |
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