Why this matters

Congenital kidney anomalies are responsible for more than half of all chronic kidney disease cases in children. Yet for over 80% of affected children, the underlying genetic cause remains unknown.

Current diagnostic tools, such as prenatal ultrasound, can detect abnormalities early but provide limited information about how the condition will develop or which treatment might be most effective.

What can multiomics tell us?

Kidney development involves many biological processes happening at the same time. Multiomics brings together different types of molecular information, including DNA accessibility, gene expression, proteins and metabolites.

Combining these layers allows researchers to study how kidney cells develop, how they interact and where development may start to differ in congenital kidney anomalies. This can help identify biological processes that may eventually become relevant for diagnosis or treatment.

Key findings from the review

The review highlights three examples of how multiomics is improving our understanding of kidney development.

Mapping human nephrogenesis
By combining single-cell RNA sequencing with 3D protein imaging, researchers have created a detailed map of how nephrons, the functional units of the kidney, form during human development. This provides an important reference for comparing healthy kidney development with congenital abnormalities.

Understanding differences between humans and mice
Comparisons between human and mouse kidney development show that many molecular programmes are shared. However, 61% of the regulatory elements controlling gene activity identified in the review were specific to humans. This highlights the importance of studying human tissue when investigating kidney development and disease.

Developmental programmes during kidney injury
The review also describes how molecular programmes normally active during fetal kidney development can become active again after kidney injury later in life. Studying these processes may help researchers understand how the kidney responds to damage and where future therapeutic opportunities might lie.

The road ahead

The authors describe several areas that could advance the field further. These include molecular atlases that follow kidney development from fetal life into childhood, improved human organoid models and computational approaches that can analyse increasingly complex datasets.

Combining these methods could help researchers understand why congenital kidney anomalies develop differently between children and improve the way patients are diagnosed and classified.

Further research is needed before these insights can be translated into new treatments. A more detailed understanding of kidney development can help researchers identify which biological changes are most relevant to disease.

About the publication

The review “Dissecting Normal and Abnormal Human Kidney Development Using Multiomics” was published online in Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN) on November 10, 2025.

The publication was authored by Luna S. Klomp, Lampros Mavrommatis, Fanny O. Arcolino, Hildo C. Lantermans, Elena Levtchenko, Christoph Kuppe and Rik Westland. Rik Westland, Moonshot 1 leader within the Kidnie Research Consortium, co-led the study with Christoph Kuppe from RWTH Aachen University. Elena Levtchenko and Fanny Oliveira Arcolino are also involved in the Kidnie Research Consortium.

The research was supported in part by the Dutch Kidney Foundation (Nierstichting), the European Research Council and the German Research Foundation.

DOI: 10.1681/ASN.0000000951

This research directly supports Kidnie’s Moonshot 1 (Cure): understanding the causes of kidney disease and damage to enable earlier and more targeted interventions for children.