{"id":242474,"date":"2026-08-10T09:09:17","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T14:09:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/soluble-signals-released-by-neighboring-cells-direct-how-the-human-kidney-is-built"},"modified":"2026-08-10T09:09:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T14:09:17","slug":"soluble-signals-released-by-neighboring-cells-direct-how-the-human-kidney-is-built","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/soluble-signals-released-by-neighboring-cells-direct-how-the-human-kidney-is-built","title":{"rendered":"Soluble signals released by neighboring cells direct how the human kidney is built"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/soluble-signals-released-by-neighboring-cells-direct-how-the-human-kidney-is-built2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A human kidney is built once, before birth, and the rules guiding its construction have been largely inferred from animal models. Researchers at Penn Medicine have now read those rules directly in human tissue. They found that developing cells are steered by soluble signals released by their neighbors\u2014and identified insulin-like growth factor 2 (IGF2) as a key signal that sustains the kidney\u2019s stem-like cells.<\/p>\n<p>Their study is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41588-026-02665-0\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Nature Genetics<\/i> and was conducted by the Penn-CHOP Kidney Innovation Center, a research collaboration between the Perelman School of Medicine and Children\u2019s Hospital of Philadelphia, working with bioengineers from Penn\u2019s School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Institute for Regenerative Medicine.<\/p>\n<p>How well a kidney is built before birth matters for the rest of a person\u2019s life. Healthy people are born with anywhere from 200,000 to 2 million nephrons\u2014the microscopic filtering units that clear waste from the blood\u2014and no more are made after birth. A low nephron endowment carries a higher lifetime risk of high blood pressure and chronic kidney disease, and severe disruptions of kidney formation are the leading cause of chronic kidney disease in children.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A human kidney is built once, before birth, and the rules guiding its construction have been largely inferred from animal models. Researchers at Penn Medicine have now read those rules directly in human tissue. They found that developing cells are steered by soluble signals released by their neighbors\u2014and identified insulin-like growth factor 2 (IGF2) as [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,11,269],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-biotech-medical","category-life-extension"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242474\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}