Innovation in kidney care requires bright ideas and funding to move forward
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For the last 5 years, the University of Washington’s Center for Dialysis Innovation has organized Innovations in Dialysis: Expediting Advances Symposium or IDEAS.
The 2-day meeting is packed each year with speakers who are in the throes of developing products that might someday supplant the hemodialysis machine – a device that has gone through rounds of updates and technical changes but, most agree, has performed blood filtration the same way for the last 50 years for patients with kidney failure.
In his closing remarks at the end of this year’s IDEAS, held Aug. 15-16 in Seattle, symposium chair Jonathan Himmelfarb, MD, and co-creator of the conference, said that no major innovations have come to fruition during the span of the symposium.
“This is our fifth IDEAS,” Himmelfarb told attendees. “Who knows when the first product that has been discussed at one of these meetings, gets to patients in a meaningful way.”
In the pipeline
Efforts to change the dialysis process are underway, from development of portable and wearable artificial kidneys that would allow users to dialyze at varying blood flows throughout the day, to implantable devices that would replicate normal kidney function. Such a device could last as long as a kidney transplant, William H. Fissell, MD, a physician scientist and medical director of The Kidney Project at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), told attendees.
The Kidney Project is led by Shuvo Roy, PhD, a bioengineer and professor in the department of bioengineering and therapeutic sciences at the UCSF.
Nephrologist Victor Gura, MD, has taken his wearable artificial kidney through three human trials, and is fine-tuning a new slimmed down model of the device that weighs about 2 pounds.
Himmelfarb has worked with Centers for Dialysis Innovation co-director Buddy Ratner, PhD, to develop the Ambulatory Kidney to Improve Vitality (AKTIV), a backpack-sized artificial kidney.
Another artificial kidney model is being developed by Ira Kurtz, MD, FRCP, FASN, chief of the division of nephrology at UCLA. Similar to the AKTIV, the portable, artificial kidney would fit inside a backpack.
Himmelfarb knows the demand for these new products, possibly still years away from commercial use, is now.
“I think we have to have a collective sense of urgency that we need to cross the finish line,” Himmelfarb said.
More funding
That requires major funding, and researchers told Healio/Nephrology News & Issues that they need millions of dollars to move ahead with building and testing their devices. Himmelfarb and his research group started with a $15 million grant from the Northwest Kidney Centers to develop the AKTIV. Gura estimates that he has spent more than $9 million on his wearable artificial kidney in the last decade. Fissell and The Kidney Project were awarded $6 million from the NIH in 2015 to develop the bioartificial kidney. KidneyX, a federally funded program that has allocated funds for innovative projects that can advance kidney care, has also awards research funds to these projects.
“We’re doing everything we can to make better choices for patients today,” Himmelfarb said.
- References:
- Game-changing artificial kidney, now in development, offers hope for dialysis-free life. https://connect.uclahealth.org/2021/11/15/game-changing-artificial-kidney-now-in-development-offers-hope-for-dialysis-free-life/. Published Nov. 15, 2021. Accessed Sept. 22, 2022.
- The Kidney Project: News and events. https://pharm.ucsf.edu/kidney/news-events. Accessed Sept. 22, 2022.
- www.healio.com/news/nephrology/20220912/conference-chair-time-of-change-for-innovation-but-new-products-for-eskd-stay-elusive
- For more information:
- Mark E. Neumann is the Editor-in-Chief of Healio/Nephrology News & Issues.
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