Good news may be on the horizon for those with chronic kidney failure! Today, approximately 600,000 people without adequate kidney function rely on dialysis to stay alive. This life saving support cost about $80,000 per patient per year, a total cost of way over $40 billion annually in the United States.
But hope springs eternal! Researcher William Fissell IV, M.D., associate professor of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt, and Shuvo Roy at the University of California at San Francisco, are developing an artificial kidney. They have the filtering units already working! The filters are made from a combination of silicon and living human kidney cells harvested from deceased donors. The finished “kidney” will be about the size of a bar of soap.
Pre-clinical testing is already underway and Fissell plans to begin human testing in 2017! That is a long time away for those who are currently on dialysis, but in terms of science, it’s just around the corner!
Although the proof of the concept stuff is already done, there’s still a lot of work to do. “Now we can make one or two at a time,” another researcher said, “but, can we make four million that all work the same? And how long can we make the cells last?”
To me this is just amazing!! But, science is just that, amazing. That’s why people write and read science fiction. And, oddly enough, science- fiction often becomes reality.
If you have friends or relatives on kidney dialysis, don’t tell them to stop and wait for the artificial kidney, but let them know that the future is bright for many who will develop kidney failure in the future. Send them this good news, and pray that you never need to use this latest medical miracle!