Kidneys perform an essential function in the body of removing the waste – salts, many metabolites and also many other waste substances. However, in many patients this kidney is damaged and there are only two possibilities for these patients:
- 1.Kidney transplantation – very difficult to do, very expensive and very difficult to find a donor
- 2.Dialysis – easy to do but requires regular dialysis.
Dialysis is mostly done with patients while they are waiting for a kidney transplant and it’s a tedious process: regular visits a few times a week to the hospital, problems with infection, clotting and pain. There are many technologies that are being considered as replacement for painful and regular dialysis:
Awak technology has a made a portable kidney and more information is available in this video from an Asian company.
However, there have been many groups that have been working on it.
Victor Gura from the Cedar Sinai Medical Centre in LA has been working on a portable kidney that can be carried. It is a complicated system and about 10lb to carry. The basic principle is filtration through a semi-permeable membrane that removes most of the work that kidney does… The other side of the filtration is another fluid that gets cleaned through another filter that is disposable. This two stage cleaning reduces the volume of dialysis fluid that is normally used in a hospital based systems. More information is here in this publication.
The other design is by Dr Fissell of Vanderbilt, Shuvo Roy of UCSF, and Dr Homes of U. Mich. that has a more silicon based design that does not require pumping since the pressure exerted on blood by the heart is enough as reviewed here.
This technology is based on a very different principle as the video shows here but it combines silicon based microfiltration device and also embedded kidney cells that serve to return some lost electrolytes and other important metabolites back to the blood. This inclusion of kidney cells makes this technology unique and is probably the only one that permits return of filterates that is not possible by other technologies.
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However, there are many technologies out there that enable a portable kidney like the carbon nanotube based technologies in the link below but one thing is clear, technology and new medical devices are going to change dialysis.