Toxicology of the kidney

Published on July 30, 2009 Updated on April 30, 2015   62 min

Other Talks in the Series: The Kidney in Health and Disease

Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
This is Lawrence Lash. I'm a professor in the Department of Pharmacology at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan, and the topic of my talk will be the Toxicology of the Kidney.
0:15
As you can see on this slide, there will be five major sections to the talk. The first section, I will review a few key points about renal structure and physiology that are important in terms of understanding why the kidney is susceptible to toxic injury and what is unique about renal structure and function. In the second section we will specifically address factors that are important in determining susceptibility of the kidney to toxicant injury. In the third and fourth sections, I will talk about different models, first in vivo models and then various in vitro models, that are used to discuss and study toxicology of the kidney, and then finally as some illustrations of how chemicals can produce toxicity in the kidney and some of the unique features as case studies, we will review briefly some examples: heavy metals, cadmium and mercury principally; halogenated solvents; antibiotics; and finally analgesics.
1:30
This slide illustrates some aspects of renal structure. First there's a nephron that is a deep nephron that goes all the way into the inner medulla as well as a superficial nephron on the right, which only goes to the outer stripe inner medulla border. The slide illustrates the different major epithelial cell types beginning with the glomerulus. This is number one. This leads into the proximal tubules, which is number two, first the proximal convoluted tubule in the cortex, then in the cortex and outer stripe of the outer medulla, one has the proximal straight tubule, then flows into the thin descending limb, then thick ascending limb, and finally into the distal tubule, connecting tubule, and into the collecting duct. And the importance of understanding this is that each cell type, each epithelial cell type, has a specific structure and function that, while allowing the kidney to have its unique physiology also provides some unique features to the susceptibility to chemically-induced injury.