For harnessing 3D printing to save lives of patients with kidney disorders

Region: North America  Sector: Health, Biotech  UN SDGs: 3, Good Health and Well-being; 9, Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure

Each year, more than 90,000 people are on wait lists for kidney transplants. Only 20,000 transplants are performed annually. Of the 70,000 people who won’t receive a transplant this year, nearly 5,000 will die — and that’s just in the United States. Globally, the need for organ transplants, including kidneys, always surpasses the supply, but in the United States, the lack of organs available for transplants is exacerbated by a high transplantable organ discard rate. According to a 2021 study published in The Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, of 1,103 kidneys discarded in the U.S. between 2015 and 2015, 493 could have been used for transplantation.

Trestle Biotherapeutics wants to fill the need for kidney transplants among the 70,000 Americans who won’t be matched with a donor and the 800 million people globally who live with chronic kidney disease by “develop[ing] new solutions that don’t currently exist.” The core focus of its work is generating implantable, bioengineered tissues that can serve as replacement organs. Put simply, Trestle wants to create 3D-printed organs to prolong and improve the lives of people with kidney disease. The technology Trestle is pioneering will also help millions of people worldwide who are on dialysis, a lifesaving but disruptive and exhausting treatment that helps keep people with end-stage renal disease alive.

Founded in 2020, Trestle Biotherapeutics seeks to leverage radical advances in 3D-printing technology and stem cell bioengineering to create a viable 3D-printed kidney. According to Harvard University’s Stem Cell Institute, whose researchers created the technology that has been licensed to Trestle for this purpose, end-stage renal disease isn’t the only condition that could be impacted by Trestle’s innovation. “Beyond kidney failure, there are more than 60 genetic diseases that directly or indirectly affect renal function, many of which cannot be appropriately treated with existing therapeutics,” according to the company.

The 2022 licensing to Trestle of the technology developed at Harvard was a significant milestone for the startup. The license acquisition allowed Trestle to launch a new research project that, if successful, will result in the creation of bioengineered kidney tissue that can perform the kidney’s most essential functions. Patients who benefit from it will be able to live a fuller life without the need for dialysis or conventional transplants. The project has three phases and is currently in Phase 2: developing methods to significantly increase the size, scale, and complexity of tissues to eventually enable the production of clinical-size tissues, which will be assessed for performance in vivo in Phase 3. If all goes to plan, the technology will be commercialized.

Prior to licensing the technology, university researchers were “able to demonstrate for the first time a more advanced kidney architecture and functionality in human kidney organoids, which is important for creating tissue segments for use in drug testing and disease modeling and, ultimately, in vivo therapeutics,” said Ryuji Morizane, a visiting scholar at Harvard and an assistant professor at Massachusetts General Hospital who worked on the technology. Morizane, along with another university researcher, Jennifer Lewis, joined Trestle’s scientific advisory board to continue providing expertise as the company advances toward its goal.

The advances made by Trestle in the year following the licensing agreement were significant, drawing the attention of The Kidney Innovation Accelerator, also known as KidneyX, which is a public-private partnership between the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the American Society of Nephrology that seeks to foster innovation in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of kidney diseases. In fact, KidneyX awarded Trestle one of its 2023 Artificial Kidney Prizes, a prestigious award that was accompanied by $1 million USD intended to accelerate Trestle’s work.

The standard of care for kidney disease patients was developed more than seven decades ago, said Trestle’s co-founder and CEO, Ben Shepherd, upon winning the KidneyX prize. “We believe that the medical system can do much better than dialysis for people living with kidney failure, and we hope that our technology will do just that.”