HomeGlobalShuvo Roy-led Project Successfully Tests Bioartificial Kidney Prototype, Wins $64K KidneyX Prize

Shuvo Roy-led Project Successfully Tests Bioartificial Kidney Prototype, Wins $64K KidneyX Prize

Shuvo Roy-led Project Successfully Tests Bioartificial Kidney Prototype, Wins $64K KidneyX Prize

UCSF Prof. Shuvo Roy. (UCSF photo)

India-West Staff Reporter

An implantable bioartificial kidney being developed by The Kidney Project – a nationwide collaboration led by Bangladeshi American Professor Shuvo Roy of U.C. San Francisco and Dr. William Fissell of Vanderbilt University Medical Center – which promises to free kidney disease patients from dialysis machines and transplant waiting lists, took another big step toward becoming reality. The research project has earned a $650,000 prize from KidneyX for the first-ever demonstration of a functional prototype of its implantable artificial kidney.

KidneyX is a public–private partnership between the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the American Society of Nephrology founded to “accelerate innovation in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of kidney diseases.”

The University of California reports that the project combined the two essential parts of its artificial kidney, the hemofilter and the bioreactor, and successfully implanted the smartphone-sized device for preclinical evaluation.

For this advance, the team was awarded KidneyX’s Phase 1 Artificial Kidney Prize and was one of six winning teams selected out of an international field, a news release said.

In the last few years, The Kidney Project successfully tested the hemofilter, which removes waste products and toxins from blood, and the bioreactor, which replicates other kidney functions, like the balance of electrolytes in blood, in separate experiments, it said.

For the Artificial Kidney Prize, the team married the two units into a scaled-down version of the artificial kidney and evaluated its performance in a preclinical model. The units worked in tandem, powered by blood pressure alone, and without the need for blood thinning or immunosuppressant drugs, according to the release.

“The vision for the artificial kidney is to provide patients with complete mobility and better physiological outcomes than dialysis,” Roy, who is a faculty member in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, a joint department of the UCSF Schools of Pharmacy and Medicine, said in a statement.

“It promises a much higher quality of life for millions worldwide with kidney failure,” he added.

Chronic kidney failure, also known as end-stage renal disease, leads to the progressive and dangerous loss of kidney function. Most patients with kidney failure must visit dialysis clinics multiple times every week to have their blood filtered, a process that is time-consuming, uncomfortable, and risky, the release said.

A minority of patients live with transplanted kidneys, thanks to a pool of donated kidneys that are constantly in high demand. But even these patients must contend with a lifetime on immunosuppressant drugs that can have severe side effects.

The Kidney Project’s artificial kidney will not only replicate the high quality of life seen in kidney transplant recipients — the “gold standard” of kidney disease treatment, according to Roy — but also spare them from needing to take immunosuppressants, it said.

The KidneyX Artificial Kidney Prize called on scientists and engineers to submit “continuous kidney replacement therapies that provide transformational treatment options beyond current dialysis methods,” a high bar that UCSF’s artificial kidney is poised to clear in the coming years, it said.

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