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Kidney failure, which affects about 600,000 people in this country is treated either by
dialysis or better if you can get one is a kidney transplant. Unfortunately less than
10 percent of the people that need a kidney transplant can get one. There are just not
enough organs available. I’m Shuvo Roy. I’m an associate professor in the Department
of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences. This is our lab and we are working on an implantable
bio artificial kidney to free the patients from the burdens of dialysis, provide them
improved quality of life and hopefully if we do this right, okay, we’ll actually have
something that’s actually going to cost less than the current therapies today. Now,
we know that the technology to get there exists. Working in that infrastructure that California
has become famous for and we’re applying it in a way that’s not been applied before
for medicine. I try to communicate the excitement that we’re taking semi kinetic technology
and applying it to medicine in an unprecedented way. So, a current dialysis machine is the
size of a refrigerator. And the key component is that is a dialysis cartridge so it’s
about two square meters of surface area. To get the same amount of filtration, we need
one-twentieth in the silicon filter. So we take these membranes, cut them into little
squares. We test each of the individual membranes for how do they perform in terms of filtration.
We challenge it with water and particles in the water that are very small and we see how
much water comes out and what particles come out. And Steve here, is basically helping
test the performance of this filter in a little cartridge. This information then gets fed
back to the people that are helping us in membrane design or people who are helping
us on surface modifications. We’d like to make sure that blood doesn’t clot in silicon.
So here I work with Zahora to basically take the membranes we have and we can coat them
with special molecules that make them blood friendly. Preprinting is a big step in sort
of helping us prototype. He can design different versions so we can look at it. Part of engineering
is you’ve got to look and feel, is it the right size? Can a surgeon implant that? We’re
testing and optimizing each of those components individually so we make them as best as they
can be. And then eventually bring them together. So, what we have here is the prototype model.
This is fake blood. Coming out here is our fake urine and in practice we wanted a pump
because the silicon membranes are so efficient that our bodies own blood pressure will be
able to drive the filtration. I feel excited when we’re making progress. When I hear
from patients, when I hear from physicians, when I hear from students, when I hear from
the other engineers that we can do this; look at the impact. There are 600,000 people who
have kidney failure in this country, two million worldwide. Less than 20,000 transplants are
performed every year. And on the waiting list today which is the sickest of the sick that
there are almost 100,000 people. If we can deliver on this, we can provide an alternative
therapy and a treatment option that doesn’t exist today for the vast majority of people
who are now forced to rely on dialysis.