Artificial Kidney Project Q&A with Shuvo Roy and William Fissell

[PaulBC]

I just caught part of a live Q&A session about the Artificial Kidney Project with Shuvo Roy and William Fissell. It was pretty interesting. Aside from explaining the project, Fissell reinforced a lot of my thoughts about why kidney research doesn't seem to have much of a hold on the popular imagination (for those unaffected by it directly). They also repeat their request to contact your representative in support of kidney research funding in the US, which I already did months ago (and got a nice response back, and probably not much action, but if more people would do it, it might help).

It is no longer live but there is YouTube link of the whole session. I won't post the link (in keeping with policy as I understand it) but the kidney project has a facebook page ArtificialKidney and you can get to the link from there.

[Riki]

I watched it this evening.... fascinating...

[PaulBC]

Dr. Fissell had a memorable quote (summing up some of my more pessimistic thoughts):

We know that end stage renal disease treated with dialysis has worse mortality than metastatic colon cancer. If somebody gives you a choice between cancer and renal failure, pick the cancer.

You can find the video by searching on "The Kidney Project: Live Q&A" (in quotes or not). He says this at 37:23.

Note that the immunosuppression drugs used after a transplant can increase chances of some cancers, so I guess the choice isn't completely hypothetical.

[Riki]

it's the complications from dialysis, and not dialysis itself, but yes, that's true.  In the 6 years that I've been at my unit, I've seen so many die.  I'm not sure if cancer patients die at the rates that kidney patients do, but it seems like so many.  Every couple of weeks, somebody dies.