Royan Kidney Group (RKG): Cells Therapy and Tissue Engineering in Renal and Urinary Tract Diseases: Stem cells as a new trend

Kidney and urinary tract research group is one of the established groups in Royan Institute, and at present, most of its activities have focused on the administration cell therapy in patients with renal transplantation, acute and chronic renal failure and urinary incontinency. Kidney and urinary tract research group started its activities in the basic and clinical sciences by the research charity institute support from ۲۰۱۲. Our final goal in kidney group is to use the cell therapy as an alternative therapeutic for treatment of different renal disease. Based on this, the group’s strategy has mainly focused on the following topics: ۱- Development and generate of renal stem cells and differentiation of pluripotent stem cells into renal cells, ۲- Create animal models of acute and chronic renal failure and transplantation of stem cells for therapeutic effects, ۳- Transplantation Immunology and provided solutions for clinical studies using animal models of transplantation, ۴- Understanding the mechanisms involved in the pathogenesis of polycystic kidneys to aid to the healing process of the patient and ۵- Cell therapy in urinary tract diseases. Several projects have designed related to with different renal cells and their transplantation in animal models of acute and chronic renal failure. According to above goals, after equipping the non-human primate animal’s lab, the model of renal failure was established in these animals as a way to study the effects of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) transplantation in decrease of inflammation and increase of regeneration. The results show that injection of bone marrow MSCs (BM-MSCs) as intra-renal vascular effectively reduce cisplatin-induced acute renal failure. Although our histological findings did not show significant differences between cell injected group with the control group, but it seems to reduce inflammation and prevent apoptosis through cell immune regulatory mechanisms, reducing symptoms and improving quality of life of treated animals. Also, there are also clinical trials using MSCs in acute and chronic renal failure. Differentiation of pluripotent stem cells into renal cells, is be designed for differentiation of embryonic stem cells into tubular cells. The proposal has been trying to plan the initial differentiation of pluripotent cells into renal progenitor cells. We are also trying to provide the normal kidney tissue engineeringscaffolds. In this study we want to transfer of progenitor cells on acellular renal tissue scaffold of monkey kidney and evaluate the renal function with new cells. Immunomodulatory properties of mesenchymal stem cells are evaluating for kidney transplantation. The effects of immune regulation will be evaluated by transplantof different sources of mesenchymal stem cells such as bone marrow or adipose tissue in animal models. Our goal is decrease the use of immunosuppressive drugs in patients receiving kidney transplants by administration of mesenchymal stem cells. Mutation analysis of coding region in PKD۱ and PKD۲ genes in autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease is other study to detect the mutations in Iranian patients with renal polycystic disease. There are also clinical trials and several projects using MSCs in animal model of polycystic kidney disease. In urinary tract diseases field, almost ۳۰ patients have been treated in the clinical trial for evaluation of the safety and efficacy of intramuscular injection of muscle stem cells in improving incontinence and the primary results show that this method can improve the patients 'symptoms without any specialcomplication.