#5 Kidney Patients
According to an estimate given by the National Kidney Foundation, nearly 100,000 patients are on the waiting list for kidney donors. And to this, 3000 names are added each year.
While they wait for the kidney donors, they are treated with dialysis. But, according to a survey, only one out of three patients survive this for more than five years.
#4 The Alternative
This is going to change as the doctors have advised an alternative to the kidney dialysis, it is artificial kidney! This bio-hybrid artificial kidney will use living kidney cells along with a series of specialized microchips powered by the human heart to filter waste from the blood-stream.
Further, the artificial kidney can bypass the complication of matching donors and tissue rejection. To address this unmet need, William Fissell from Vanderbilt and Shuvo Roy from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) launched The Kidney Project.
#3 The Artificial Kidney
Explaining more about it in a recent article published by Research News Vanderbilt, Fissel wrote, "We can leverage Mother Nature’s 60 million years of research and development and use kidney cells that fortunately for us grow well in the lab dish, and grow them into a bioreactor of living cells".
Further, he claims that it can reliably distinguish between waste chemicals and the nutrients that need to be reabsorbed by the body.
#2 The Surgery
This artificial kidney will be inserted by a simple surgery. It has proved to work efficiently in the human body. The artificial kidney has 15 microchips built one atop the other and they act as filters. They will hold living renal cells which will eventually grow around the microchips and mimic a real kidney. Engineers are currently working and testing every single detail of the device to make sure the device can safely let the blood run through without the formation of clots or damaging the kidney in any way.
#1 The Video
It has been working perfectly fine with zero rejection rate. The research has shown promising results but the human trial is yet to commence. Here's the video
