Bringing the miracle of dialysis home

October 16th, 2008
Bringing the miracle of dialysis home

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 9:03 am

This is my grandfather, Edmund O’Donnell, whom I never met. I look more like him than any grandparent I actually did meet.

My mother didn’t know him either. He died in 1927, when she was just three. Of kidney disease.

I have had his picture on my mantel since I moved to this office, several years ago. It looks down on my inkjet printer.

Which leads us to a tech story. Grandpa Edmund died because kidney dialysis was still 40 years away.

Since then I have known many dialysis patients. One of my neighbors is doing it right now. She goes in every three days and lives her life on that cycle. Her children take her to the clinic, and she’s OK for a time, until the toxins build up and it starts again.

If she could do it at home, on her schedule, maybe she would not feel so tired, and ever feel (as she told me recently) that maybe it’s time for her to go to heaven.

So this story, of H-P inkjet technology being applied to dialysis by a start-up called Home Dialysis Plus, is personal.

It’s an inkjet’s ability to deliver precise amounts of fluid in a precise stream that is key here. Instead of running ink you run water and drugs.

I don’t know whether HDP can meet the promise of its name. Bringing the cost of a dialysis rig down to where people can rent them is going to be an enormous challenge. Making it simple enough for consumers to use is another.

At best we’re five years away from a working, approved device. Maybe more.

But I don’t know that kidney disease doesn’t run in my family somewhere. And I have more friends. So godspeed.

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994.