Renal fibrosis is a hallmark of progressive renal diseases. To date, there is a lack of effective therapeutics for the treatment of renal fibrosis, in part due to the scarcity of clinically relevant translational disease models. Since the early 1920s, hand-cut tissue slices have been used as a means to better understand organ (patho)physiology in a variety of scientific fields. From that time, the equipment and methodology for the preparation of tissue slices has continuously improved, thereby expanding the applicability of the model. Nowadays, precision-cut kidney slices (PCKS) have been demonstrated to be an extremely valuable translation model for renal (patho)physiology, bridging the gap between preclinical and clinical research. A key feature of PCKS is that the slices contain all cell types and acellular components of the whole organ in the original configuration while preserving cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions. In this chapter, we describe how to prepare PCKS and how the model can be implemented in fibrosis research.
Keywords: Ex vivo; Kidney; Krumdieck tissue slicer; Precision-cut kidney slices; Preclinical drug testing; Renal fibrosis; Translational research.
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