Hope of dialysis end - Indian engineer makes coffee cup-size artificial kidney

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Hope of dialysis end - Indian engineer makes coffee cup-size artificial kidney
OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
Shuvo Roy

New Delhi, Dec. 3: Shuvo Roy has a PhD in electrical engineering but his experimental handiwork may give the world its first implantable artificial kidney, a potential alternative to dialysis and transplants for patients with end-stage kidney failure.

The bioengineering specialist of Indian origin at the University of California, San Francisco, has demonstrated the feasibility of an implantable kidney in animals, and hopes to refine the coffee cup-sized prototype for clinical trials in humans in about five years.

“This device is designed to deliver most of the health benefits of a kidney transplant,” said Roy, associate professor at the UCSF School of Pharmacy, who has spent much of the past three years developing the miniaturised implantable device for total renal replacement therapy.

“This could dramatically reduce the burden of renal failure for millions of people worldwide,” Roy said in a statement issued through his university. One part of the device has tiny filters that remove waste products from blood, while another part mimics the kidney’s water-balancing role.

Roy’s goal is to refine the current prototype into an implantable device for patients with kidney failure for whom it would serve as a bio-artificial organ. Roy and his colleagues at the University of Michigan and the Cleveland Clinic Foundation have filed a patent on such a bio-artificial organ.

While dialysis and transplants are life-sustaining procedures for patients with kidney failure, a fully implantable bio-artificial organ has been a long-standing goal in medicine.

“Such alternatives to dialysis or transplants are still experimental devices,” said Jitendra Kumar, head of nephrology at the Asian Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, who was not connected with the research. “But we need technologies to make dialysis easier for patients.”

Doctors say the need for facilities to treat kidney failure is growing. “At least 100,000 people develop kidney failure in India each year and join the pool of patients who require dialysis or transplants,” Kumar said.

Present-day haemodialysis requires a bulky dialyser that may measure more than 12 inches in length and uses electromechanical pumps to extract blood out of the body, remove waste products, and infuse it back into the body.

“The machine is bulky and haemodialysis in India is usually done in hospitals,” Kumar said. An alternative to haemodialysis is peritoneal dialysis in which a tube carries a blood-cleaning fluid into the abdominal cavity but the dialysis needs to be activated three times a day. The dialysis technique typically costs between Rs 15,000 and Rs 35,000 per month in India, Kumar said.

Roy has used micro-electromechanical systems — tapping his expertise in electrical engineering — to try and shrink a room-sized model of the filter, developed by a colleague at the University of Michigan, into a small device no larger than a coffee cup.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1101204/jsp/nation/story_13257619.jsp