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. 2020 Nov 21;11(11):1000. doi: 10.1038/s41419-020-03206-1

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 2 — Embryonic stem (ES) cells are pluripotent stem cells derived from the inner cell mass. Then with the treatment of growth factors such as TGF-β1, activin A, BMP-4, HGF, human ES-derived cells can be differentiated into kidney lineage expressing WT1 and the glomerular marker gene rennin in vitro. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are formed by reprogramming terminally differentiated somatic cells with the assistance of specific transcription factors. Human mesangial cells can be induced into pluripotent stem cells through four defined transcription factors, OCT4, SOX2, KLF4, and c-Myc. Another four factors, OCT4, SOX2, NANOG, and LIN28, are sufficient to reprogram human fibroblasts into iPSCs as well. By chemical induction of small molecule inhibitor CHIR99021 of GSK-3β, human iPSCs can differentiate into intermediate mesoderm (IM) followed by FGF-2 and RA and subsequently form tubular structures upon growth factor withdrawal. In serum and feeder-free conditioned systems, hPSCs (referred to as human ES cells and iPSCs) can differentiate into renal progenitor cells (NPCs) which significantly express the specific gene markers SIX2, GDNF, HOXD11, WT1, and CITED1. Next, NPCs have the potential to differentiate into both tubular epithelial cells (TECs) and glomerular podocytes with BMP-7 and FGF-2 in vitro.