A study published in Nature Communications provides new insight into how damaged cells interact within disease-promoting microenvironments following acute kidney injury, or AKI. With limited treatment options, AKI frequently progresses to chronic kidney disease (CKD), which affects more than 1 in 7 U.S. adults—an estimated 37 million people.

The new findings may contribute to future efforts to prevent CKD, which can lead to kidney failure.

The study brought together scientists from Andy McMahon’s lab at USC and Long Cai’s lab at Caltech, with support from a USC Broad Innovation Award that funded the cross-institutional research collaboration.

In the study, co-first authors Michal Polonsky from Caltech and Louisa Gerhardt from USC, leveraged a cutting-edge tool, called seqFISH, developed in the Cai laboratory. With this tool, researchers can gather information about genetic activity and study cellular interactions in intact kidney tissue in mice with AKI. This allowed the scientists to analyze the precise expression of over 1,000 genes in the injured kidney tissue, identify microenvironments associated with injury, and predict cellular interactions associated with the progression to CKD.

To read more, visit https://stemcell.keck.usc.edu/cells-get-involved-in-unhealthy-relationships-after-acute-kidney-injury.