Recent demographic studies predict there will be a considerable increase in the number of elderly people within the next few decades. Aging has been recognized as one of the main risk factors for the world's most prevalent diseases such as neurodegenerative disorders, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic diseases. During the process of aging, a gradual loss of tissue volume and organ function is observed, which is partially caused by replicative senescence. The capacity of cellular proliferation and replicative senescence is tightly regulated by their telomere length. When telomere length is critically shortened with progressive cell division, cells become proliferatively arrested, and DNA damage response and cellular senescence are triggered, whereupon the "Hayflick limit" is attained at this stage. Podocytes are a cell type found in the kidney glomerulus where they have major roles in blood filtration. Mature podocytes are terminal differentiated cells that are unable to undergo cell division in vivo. For this reason, the establishment of primary podocyte cell cultures has been very challenging. In our present study, we present the successful immortalization of a human podocyte progenitor cell line, of which the primary cells were isolated directly from the urine of a 51-year-old male. The immortalized cell line was cultured over the course of one year (~100 passages) with high proliferation capacity, endowed with contact inhibition and P53 expression. Furthermore, by immunofluorescence-based expression and quantitative real-time PCR for the podocyte markers CD2AP, LMX1B, NPHS1, SYNPO and WT1, we confirmed the differentiation capacity of the immortalized cells. Finally, we evaluated and confirmed the responsiveness of the immortalized cells on the main mediator angiotensin II (ANGII) of the renin-angiotensin system (RAAS). In conclusion, we have shown that it is possible to bypass cellular replicative senescence (Hayflick limit) by TERT-driven immortalization of human urine-derived pre-podocyte cells from a 51-year-old African male.
Keywords: human telomerase; podocytes; renin–angiotensin-system.