Currently, the best hope for kidney patients to get off dialysis is to wait for a transplant, but that can sometimes take up to five years and even longer depending on location. That may soon change though, thanks to a new engineering breakthrough from a Bay Area research team, which was recently awarded a major prize for a device they hope will someday significantly improve the lives of kidney patients.
The device is essentially an implantable artificial kidney, that the research team started working on a decade ago. The latest prototype involves two chambers, each about the size of a deck of cards, reports ABC News. One side of the device features membrane filters for cleaning the blood — similar to dialysis — while the other side has a bioreactor filled with living cells, which carry out some of the other functions a kidney would normally perform.
“Our artificial kidney will allow patients to eat and drink freely. Travel without being tethered to a machine. And have better physiological outcomes because they’re getting continuous treatment,” explains UCSF researcher Shuvo Roy, Ph.D.
So far, the device has been successfully tested in animals but — while the results are considered a turning point — the research team says the model will have to be scaled up to make human trials possible. The ultimate aim is to keep the unit at a size that can be implanted in the body while adding more filtering power along with a better performing biological capability.
The team working on the project recently won a $650,000 prize from the group Kidney-X, which is a public-private partnership working to accelerate the treatment of kidney disease.
The post Artificial kidneys could one day free patients from dialysis first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.
Currently, the best hope for kidney patients to get off dialysis is to wait for a transplant, but that can sometimes take up to five years and even longer depending on location. That may soon change though, thanks to a new engineering breakthrough from a Bay Area research team, which was recently awarded a major
The post Artificial kidneys could one day free patients from dialysis first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.