Acute renal failure (ARF) results from ischemic or toxic renal injury and is a common disorder with an overall mortality rate of about 50%. Despite the advent of dialysis and increasing knowledge regarding the causes and the effects of ARF, this trend has hardly changed for several decades. Cisplatin is a broadly used anticancer drug and is widely known to induce acute renal failure as a result of renal tubular injury. In this study, we have demonstrated that: (1) TauT is down-regulated by the p53 tumor suppressor gene in renal proximal tubule LLC-PK1 cells; (2) cisplatin down-regulates the expression of TauT in renal proximal tubule cells through, at least in part, a p53-dependent pathway; and (3) forced overexpression of TauT can attenuate cisplatin-induced apoptosis of renal proximal tubule cells.