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KidneyX aims to ‘bridge the gap’ between product development, patient quality of life
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The KidneyX Innovation Accelerator, a partnership between HHS and the American Society of Nephrology intended to encourage innovation relating to diagnosis, prevention and treatment of kidney disease, will announce winners in 2020 for both its Patient Innovator Challenge and Redesign Dialysis Phase 2 competitions.
“We want to get over this ‘valley of death’ that exists between science and commercialization,” Sandeep Patel, PhD, KidneyX director and open innovation manager at HHS, told Nephrology News & Issues. “Our goal is help to catalyze disruptive, breakthrough technologies — not just incremental improvements in dialysis, which is already happening in the market, but to create a space where we can think about replacements to dialysis, and entirely new classes of drugs or other products.”
Up to 25 winners will be selected from the Patient Innovator Challenge, which consists of a “Solutions in Practice” category for solutions that have been previously tried or are currently in practice as well as a “New Ideas” category that encourages participants to submit proposals that have not yet been attempted. Of the participants, 10 from the solutions category will each receive a $4,000 prize and 15 participants from the new ideas category will receive $2,000 each. Submissions are now closed, and winners will be announced March 26, 2020.
“We don’t normally recognize patients as innovators and entrepreneurs in their own right,” Patel said. “Patients are themselves, in many cases, innovators because they have to, in the care of their own lives on a day-to-day basis, be creative and innovative in the way they use devices and take care of themselves.”
For the Redesign Dialysis Phase 2 challenge, which challenges participants with building solutions that replicate normal kidney functions or improve dialysis access, three winners will be selected to receive $500,000 each. The increased award is intended to cover the cost of building potential prototypes, according to Patel.
Phase 2 of the contest is intended to shift participants’ focus from initial design of products and innovations to concrete, real-world development of ideas, as well as the expansion of the type of kidney-related issues that can be addressed.
“We’re starting to move into a state where we’re trying to be more specific about what kind of products need to exist that can transform patients’ lives,” Patel said. “What we’re trying to do is focus entrepreneurs and innovators on these big moonshot kinds of goals, like developing an artificial kidney.”
Similar to phase 1 of the challenge, solutions considered address blood filtration, electrolyte homeostasis, volume regulation, toxin removal and secretion, filtration drainage and connectivity and dialysis access. Contest submissions will be accepted from Nov. 11, 2019 to Jan. 31, 2020 with winners announced on May 18, 2020. Participants are encouraged to enter even if they did not make a submission to phase 1 of the contest.
Judges will look for “innovative, fresh, practical but transformative ideas” during the selection process for both competitions, according to Patel. Aside from creating funding opportunities for participants, Patel hopes the accelerator can “bridge the gap” between developments in kidney science and real-world product development to improve overall patient quality of life.
“KidneyX has spurred enthusiasm among the nephrology community,” John R. Sedor, MD, FASN, chair of the KidneyX steering committee and secretary-treasurer of ASN, told Nephrology News & Issues. “It has caused excitement and re-energized the field, which will hopefully in turn spur greater innovation that can improve the lives of the 850 million people worldwide who are currently affected by kidney diseases.”
Although an exact date has not yet been announced, another KidneyX Summit is slated for 2020, according to Patel. He believes the summit is not just a funding opportunity for KidneyX participants, but also an event in which contest winners can “collaborate with one another and share ideas” both during and after the contest.
“We want to act as a catalyst so that there is a healthy innovation ecosystem broadly in kidney disease treatment and diagnosis,” Patel said. “There is no shortage of new products and innovation that needs to happen, and we want to make sure we’ve done our job in making sure there is a healthy ecosystem of smart people working on those problems.” – by Eamon Dreisbach
- Reference:
- Kidneyx.org. Welcome to KidneyX Innovation Accelerator. www.kidneyx.org. Accessed Sept. 25, 2019.
Disclosures: Patel is the director of the KidneyX Accelerator and open innovation manager of HHS. Sedor is chair of the KidneyX steering committee and secretary-treasurer of the ASN.