kidney failure, which affects about 600,000people in this country is treated either by dialysis or better if you can get one is akidney transplant. unfortunately less than 10 percent of the people that need a kidneytransplant 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 patientsfrom the burdens of dialysis, provide them improved quality of life and hopefully ifwe do this right, okay, we’ll actually have something that’s actually going to costless 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 applyingit in a way that’s not been applied before for medicine. i try to communicate the excitementthat we’re taking semi kinetic technology and applying it to medicine in an unprecedentedway. so, a current dialysis machine is the size of a refrigerator. and the key componentis that is a dialysis cartridge so it’s about two square meters of surface area. toget the same amount of filtration, we need one-twentieth in the silicon filter. so wetake these membranes, cut them into little squares. we test each of the individual membranesfor how do they perform in terms of filtration. we challenge it with water and particles inthe water that are very small and we see how much water comes out and what particles comeout. and steve here, is basically helping
test the performance of this filter in a littlecartridge. this information then gets fed back to the people that are helping us inmembrane design or people who are helping us on surface modifications. we’d like tomake sure that blood doesn’t clot in silicon. so here i work with zahora to basically takethe membranes we have and we can coat them with special molecules that make them bloodfriendly. preprinting is a big step in sort of helping us prototype. he can design differentversions so we can look at it. part of engineering is you’ve got to look and feel, is it theright size? can a surgeon implant that? we’re testing and optimizing each of those componentsindividually 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 ourfake urine and in practice we wanted a pump because the silicon membranes are so efficientthat our bodies own blood pressure will be able to drive the filtration. i feel excitedwhen 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; lookat the impact. there are 600,000 people who have kidney failure in this country, two millionworldwide. less than 20,000 transplants are
how 3d printing body parts will revolutionize medicine,performed every year. and on the waiting listtoday which is the sickest of the sick that there are almost 100,000 people. if we candeliver on this, we can provide an alternative therapy and a treatment option that doesn’texist today for the vast majority of people
who are now forced to rely on dialysis.
