Worldwide, an estimated 200 million people have chronic kidney disease. Treatment options for patients are dialysis or a kidney transplant. The patients are treated with dialysis while they are waiting for a transplant.
Millions of people across the world sit for hours, hooked up to a dialysis machine that takes over the job of their kidneys. They just have two alternatives, get a kidney transplant or die. But there is a worldwide shortage of donor kidneys and patients have to wait for years for a viable transplant.
Patients often die while waiting for an organ transplant, so dialysis may be the only option until a transplant can be performed. To eliminate the need for dialysis, scientists are developing an implantable artificial kidney that can filter waste from the bloodstream like a real organ.
The need is urgent since the annual cost of dialysis is estimated at $90,000 per patient
Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, recently unveiled a prototype model of the first implantable artificial kidney.
Patients with chronic kidney failure could be freed from regular dialysis
The artificial kidney will shrink the refrigerator-size dialysis machine into a small device the size of a coffee cup.
The device has a membrane that filters the blood and a bioreactor that’s primed with living kidney cells to interact with the body.
Researchers led by bioengineer Shuvo Roy received a major boost when the National Institutes of Health awarded a multimillion-dollar grant to this project for human testing.