Targeting allograft inflammatory factor-1 reprograms kidney macrophages to enhance repair.

The role of macrophages remains incompletely understood in kidney injury and repair. Their plasticity offers an opportunity to polarize them towards mediating injury resolution in both native and transplanted kidneys undergoing ischemia and/or rejection. Here, we show that infiltrating kidney macrophages augmented their AIF-1 expression after injury.

Differential roles of normal and lung cancer-associated fibroblasts in microvascular network formation.

Perfusable microvascular networks offer promising three-dimensional models to study normal and compromised vascular tissues as well as phenomena such as cancer cell metastasis. Engineering of these microvascular networks generally involves the use of endothelial cells stabilized by fibroblasts to generate robust and stable vasculature. However, fibroblasts are highly heterogenous and may contribute variably to the microvascular structure.

Rapid tissue prototyping with micro-organospheres.

In vitro tissue models hold great promise for modeling diseases and drug responses. Here, we used emulsion microfluidics to form micro-organospheres (MOSs), which are droplet-encapsulated miniature three-dimensional (3D) tissue models that can be established rapidly from patient tissues or cells. MOSs retain key biological features and responses to chemo-, targeted, and radiation therapies compared with organoids.

Blocking CCL8-CCR8-Mediated Early Allograft Inflammation Improves Kidney Transplant Function.

Background: In kidney transplantation, early allograft inflammation impairs long-term allograft function. However, precise mediators of early kidney allograft inflammation are unclear, making it challenging to design therapeutic interventions.

Methods: We used an allogeneic murine kidney transplant model in which CD45.

Patient-derived micro-organospheres enable clinical precision oncology.

Patient-derived xenografts (PDXs) and patient-derived organoids (PDOs) have been shown to model clinical response to cancer therapy. However, it remains challenging to use these models to guide timely clinical decisions for cancer patients. Here, we used droplet emulsion microfluidics with temperature control and dead-volume minimization to rapidly generate thousands of micro-organospheres (MOSs) from low-volume patient tissues, which serve as an ideal patient-derived model for clinical precision oncology.

Zebrafish Posterior Lateral Line primordium migration requires interactions between a superficial sheath of motile cells and the skin.

The Zebrafish Posterior Lateral Line primordium migrates in a channel between the skin and somites. Its migration depends on the coordinated movement of its mesenchymal-like leading cells and trailing cells, which form epithelial rosettes, or protoneuromasts. We describe a superficial population of flat primordium cells that wrap around deeper epithelialized cells and extend polarized lamellipodia to migrate apposed to the overlying skin.

Single cell transcriptomics of mouse kidney transplants reveals a myeloid cell pathway for transplant rejection.

Myeloid cells are increasingly recognized as major players in transplant rejection. Here, we used a murine kidney transplantation model and single cell transcriptomics to dissect the contribution of myeloid cell subsets and their potential signaling pathways to kidney transplant rejection. Using a variety of bioinformatic techniques, including machine learning, we demonstrate that kidney allograft-infiltrating myeloid cells followed a trajectory of differentiation from monocytes to proinflammatory macrophages, and they exhibited distinct interactions with kidney allograft parenchymal cells.