The creation of a vital industrial kidney heralds the elimination of kidney failure

More than 850 million people worldwide suffer from some form of kidney disease, which is nearly twice as many people with diabetes (422 million), and more than 20 times as many as 42 cancer patients worldwide. million people, according to a study conducted by the International Society of Nephrology "ISN" (ISN) and published on its platform recently.

The study stated that the prevalence of chronic kidney disease worldwide is 10.4% among men and 11.8% among women, and 13.3 million people in the world suffer from acute renal failure, which usually develops into chronic kidney disease or kidney failure in the future.

If we come to the financial cost, treating people with kidney disease and kidney failure constitutes a heavy financial burden on health care budgets in various countries of the world, as the annual cost for each patient who needs dialysis is more than 88,000 dollars in the United States of America, and it reaches about 59 A thousand dollars in Germany, and 83,000 dollars in France, and these are just examples, and we can imagine the cost globally, as the study mentioned.

So there is an urgent need for a new innovation that eases the pain of hundreds of millions of people in the world, and gives them hope for a better life without dialysis machines, or waiting for donors who may never come.

The Kidney Project finds the solution

In this context, the American "The Kidney Project's" recently received an American KidneyX award of $650,000 for inventing a bio-prosthetic kidney that heralds millions of patients around the world with the end of the era of dialysis and the strenuous waiting. For the lists of donors, according to the American University of California platform in a recent report.

The Kidney X Foundation was established as a joint venture between the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the American Society of Nephrology (ASN), with the goal of "accelerating innovation in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of kidney disease."

Chronic renal failure leads to a gradual and serious loss of kidney function, and most of its patients must visit dialysis clinics several times a week for blood purification (European News Agency)

The Kidney Project, a national project led by Professor Shufu Roy, Ph.D. from the University of California, and William Wessel, Professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, succeeded in integrating the two core parts of the artificial kidney project that they were working on separately, namely a “candidate The blood” and the “bioreactor”, to make a vital kidney the size of a small cell phone, then move on to the next step, which is the clinical evaluation.

In the past few years, the team has successfully tested the two most important components of a biosynthetic kidney: a "blood filter" that removes waste and toxins from the blood, and a "bioreactor" that replicates other kidney functions.

Then the scientists combined the two units together to produce a miniature version of the artificial kidney, and tested the performance of this kidney, as the two units worked together in perfect harmony with the support of blood pressure alone without the need for blood liquefaction as is done in washing operations, or the immunosuppressive auxiliary drugs that kidney failure patients usually take When washing operations were carried out, which was a great success for the project, the team deserved the mentioned award.

A better future for millions of people

Professor Shufu Roy, the team leader, who is currently a professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at the University of California, said in a press statement reported by the university's platform, "This college promises a much better future for millions of patients with kidney failure all over the world, and I can say that the era of dialysis has It's gone forever."

Chronic kidney failure leads to a gradual and serious loss of kidney function, and most kidney failure patients must visit dialysis clinics several times each week for blood filtering, a painful, time-consuming and risky process.

A minority of patients live with the transplanted kidney, which they received from their relatives, or waited too long in the lists of donors, but even these patients have to deal their whole life with immunosuppressive drugs that can have serious side effects .. "With the new artificial kidney There is no need for all this fuss, there is no need for dialysis or taking immunosuppressive drugs,” stresses Roy.

Roy explained, "Our team designed this artificial kidney to coexist in perfect harmony with the cells of the body without stimulating the immune system, and now that we have demonstrated the feasibility of combining a blood filter and a bioreactor, we can focus on raising the level of technology used to conduct more rigorous preclinical testing, and eventually we will move to the stage of trials. Clinical".

The Kidney X Foundation has called on scientists and engineers to devise new technology treatments that go beyond kidney transplantation or debilitating dialysis, which is what has been achieved with the biosynthetic kidney that Dr. Roy and his team have already created.