Northwest Kidney Centers invests $15M in Center for Dialysis Innovation

[Bill Peckham]

Seattle-based nonprofit Northwest Kidney Centers plans to invest $15 million in the 4-month-old Center for Dialysis Innovation over the next five years.

The grant represents 60 percent of the center’s five-year $25 million fundraising target.

“We are incredibly grateful to Northwest Kidney Centers for the gift to launch the Kidney Research Institute in 2008, and now for such a significant boost to the momentum of the Center for Dialysis Innovation,” said Dr. Jonathan Himmelfarb, co-director of the center.

The Center for Dialysis Innovation opened in November through a partnership between Northwest Kidney Centers, UW Medicine and the University of Washington.

Because kidney disease affects more than 20 million American adults and is the ninth-leading cause of death in the U.S., the goal of the center is to revolutionize treatment technology for patients waiting for kidney transplants with the help of biomaterials and bioengineering.

“We are working to upgrade and substantially improve the entire dialysis system to create safer, faster, more cost-effective dialysis,” Himmelfarb said in an interview after the opening. “By bringing physicians, engineers, scientists and kidney patients together, we can address each of the major kidney dialysis complications."

The $15 million grant builds on longstanding ties between the University of Washington and the Northwest Kidney Center. The University of Washington team invented technology for ongoing dialysis in 1960, and the Northwest Kidney Centers was founded two years later to provide the life-sustaining treatments. It was the first dialysis organization in the world, according to the organization.

The two partnered in 2008 to create the Kidney Research Institute.

“The excitement we feel today harks back to the environment here in Seattle in the early 1960s that produced the first successful dialysis therapy for ongoing treatment of people with permanent kidney failure," Northwest Kidney Centers CEO Joyce Jackson said in a statement. "We’re eager to see how far talented scientists, engineers and physicians of this current generation can go to provide hope for people with chronic kidney disease.”

[Rerun]

Dialysis has gone about as far as it can go.  Get started on the artificial KIDNEY.  Researchers should not get PAID until they cure something.  A little more incentive than grant after grant after grant.  Job security to NOT find a cure.

       

[Bill Peckham]

http://www.dailyuw.com/wellness/article_26331186-d303-11e6-acf7-5b0ad5d46c82.html

Newly opened Center for Dialysis Innovation reimagines 50-year-old kidney disease treatment


Kidney dialysis is about to get a long overdue upgrade. The primary treatment for patients with end-stage kidney disease, dialysis is meant to clean toxins and waste products from the blood in place of working kidneys. Approximately 400,000 people in the United States alone and 4 million people worldwide receive ongoing kidney dialysis treatment.

In early November, a new research center at UW Medicine, the Center for Dialysis Innovation (CDI), was launched primarily to conduct innovative research on dialysis technology. The center is run by two co-directors, Dr. Jonathan Himmelfarb and Dr. Buddy Ratner.

Himmelfarb is the director of the Kidney Research Institute and is a professor of nephrology at the UW School of Medicine. Ratner is the director of the Engineered Biomaterials Engineering Research Center, and a professor in bioengineering and chemical engineering at the UW.

“The impetus behind the center was that patients want and deserve something better for treatment options than the options that we have for people today who require dialysis therapy,” Himmelfarb said, describing the CDI as a clinical and translational research center.

The center is a continuation of the UW’s rich legacy in kidney dialysis innovation: Kidney dialysis was invented at the UW. A partnership between Dr. Belding Scribner, medical doctor and professor at the UW School of Medicine, Albert Babb, chemical engineer, and Wayne Quinton, bioengineer, led to the creation of kidney dialysis as we know it today.

“The three of them came up with a technology that has literally transformed medicine,” Ratner said. “As soon as that happened, they could readily save anybody with kidney failure. And that was thousands, tens of thousands of people a year.”

Before kidney dialysis was introduced, there was no known treatment for chronic, late-stage kidney disease.

“Up until about 1960, or maybe even 1962, if your kidneys failed, you were literally sentenced to death,” Ratner said. “You were told that there was nothing we can do, and there are no therapies available, and you will die in about three weeks.”

Though kidney dialysis was a monumental medical achievement, it has remained relatively unchanged since it was first introduced. Dialysis technology, according to Himmelfarb, hasn’t had the same kind of innovation as many other fields of medicine.

Ensuring the center’s research is translated from the university is a major goal of the new center. As it is now, kidney dialysis treatment significantly disrupts patients’ everyday lives, but researchers at the center hope to improve the current technology.

“From a patient perspective, we thought that patients’ lives could be improved if we could develop a dialysis device that allows patients to be ­­­­­­­behaviorally mobile, [which includes] walking around, doing their activities of daily living, and getting their treatment, as opposed to going to a center and being tied to a machine for a number of hours multiple days a week,” Himmelfarb said.

But dialysis is not just an inconvenience; patients often experience medical complications as a result of treatment.

“During dialysis, we try to do in four hours what our own kidneys would have done over two days or over three days,” Himmelfarb said.

The rapid changes in the composition of body fluids can cause problems during dialysis, such as low blood pressure and nausea.

Part of developing new dialysis technology is figuring out how to transfer the technology from the university to the market. Though still in the early stages, the center is already working hard to commercialize its new dialysis technology.

“We are very ambitiously saying we want to get our mobile device to patients in about five or six years,” said Kassandra Thomson, director of translational research and commercialization.

Despite formidable market and technical challenges, Himmelfarb remains optimistic that the center can turn its vision into reality.

“We will be working very hard in putting together multi-disciplinary teams to attack these problems in a way that [hasn’t] been done in the past,” Himmelfarb said. “We hope that this approach will be successful in developing some of these new technologies that will be very patient-focused.”

[Bill Peckham]

https://youtu.be/vjcqjJDoAwQ


@1 minute mark "Our mobile device will transform dialysis. It will be low cost, efficient, use much less water, generate its own electricity and will thus will be accessible to millions worldwide. It will work 24/7 like a healthy kidney making people feel better and extending their lives significantly. This is not a pie in the sky dream ... we can make this happen and bring this to patients in six years time."

[Rerun]

Remember Star Trek?  They would go stand on the circle and beam them somewhere.  I wish that is all we had to do everyday.  Change our cellular composition and we would be good to go for the day.

 

[cassandra]

Wow that sounds amazing. I want the sun to shine too, world peace and food for everybody.