Two researchers from UCLA and the Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System have developed a design for an automated, wearable artificial kidney, or AWAK, that avoids the complications patients often suffer with traditional dialysis.
The design for the peritoneal-based artificial kidney — which is "bloodless" and reduces or even eliminates protein loss and other dialysis-related problems — is summarized in an article published in the current issue of the journal
Clinical and Experimental Nephrology, available online at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10157-008-0050-9.
UCLA–VA has also signed an exclusive licensing agreement with the Singapore-based company AWAK Technologies Pte. Ltd. to develop a commercial wearable kidney based on the design by Martin Roberts, an assistant professor of clinical medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a dialysis consultant with the VA Healthcare System, and David B.N. Lee, a professor of medicine at the Geffen School and a consultant nephrologist at the VA.
Around 1980, an artificial kidney machine was built that incorporated many of the principles on which the new technology relies, according to Roberts. But that machine, while portable, was not wearable. The new technology would allow patients to go about their regular business while undergoing dialysis.
"What's really new about it is the patient's freedom," Roberts said. "To me, as the inventor, the most important thing for the patients is their freedom. The next important thing is that because it's working all the time instead of intermittently, you can do a much better job of treating the patient. So we expect the patient to feel better and live longer."
Kidneys remove metabolic wastes from the body and regulate fluid volume and distribution on a continuous, around-the-clock basis. With traditional hemodialysis, patients are hooked up to a machine for four hours, three times a week. Their blood is filtered through the machine to remove toxins and is then pumped back into the body. What hemodialysis can't do, however, is provide cleansing and fluid balance on a continuous basis; therefore, toxin levels and fluid volume tend to fluctuate, causing "shocks" to the patient's system. The same is true of standard peritoneal-based dialysis.
In addition, hemodialysis uses anticoagulants to prevent the blood circulating outside the body from clotting. But this, too, can cause complications. Work on other wearable kidneys has been based on this hemodialysis or hemofiltration model.
The AWAK, on the other hand, would function continuously, as natural kidneys do, eliminating patient "shocks." And because it does not involve blood circulation outside the body, it is "bloodless." It also regenerates and reuses fluid and protein components in the spent dialysate — the fluid that has abstracted toxins from the patient's blood and which is discarded in current practice — making it waterless and minimizing or eliminating protein loss.
"Dialysis-on-the-go, made possible by AWAK's 'wearability' and automation, frees end-stage renal failure patients from the servitude that is demanded by the current dialytic regimentations," Roberts and Lee write in the journal article.
Source: University of California - Los Angeles
Related stories:
Nevada company, ORNL develop potential lifesaver
A Las Vegas business and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are improving the odds for people medically at risk from dehydration or congestive heart failure.
Nano World: Nano for artificial kidneys
Nanotechnological filters could lead to wearable or implantable artificial kidneys, experts told UPI's Nano World. Animal studies for artificial-kidney prototypes should begin one or two years from now, and clinical trials would follow a year or two afterward, reported scientists at Biophiltre in Burlingame, Calif., the medical-device company developing the artificial-kidney technology.
Scientists produce nanoscale droplets with cancer-fighting implications
(PhysOrg.com) -- UCLA scientists have succeeded in making unique nanoscale droplets that are much smaller than a human cell and can potentially be used to deliver pharmaceuticals.
Rapid changes in key Alzheimer's protein described in humans
For the first time, researchers have described hour-by-hour changes in the amount of amyloid beta, a protein that is believed to play a key role in Alzheimer's disease, in the human brain. A collaborative team of scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Milan report their results this week in
Science.
Study outcome won't sway company on eye drug
(AP) -- What does a company do when there's anecdotal evidence that two of its drugs are equally effective in treating a leading cause of blindness in the elderly, one costing patients $60 per treatment and the other $2,000? In the case of Genentech Inc., nothing.
Blood pressure response to daily stress provides clues for better hypertension treatment
How the body regulates blood pressure in response to daily stress is the focus of a study geared toward helping people whose pressure is out of control.
Study points to new test for Alzheimer's
A method of medical imaging known as PET scans may allow doctors to develop a non-invasive test for Alzheimer's by spotting abnormal brain "plaques" associated with the disease, Finnish researchers report in a new study.
New implant device remotely monitors heart failure patients at Northwestern Memorial
Chest pain and shortness of breath are common symptoms that send tens of thousands of heart failure (HF) patients into U.S. hospitals each month. Cardiologists at the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute of Northwestern Memorial Hospital may be able to curb such visits for some of their HF patients as they recently became Chicago's first researchers using a new wireless pressure sensor technology that allows them to track the pulmonary artery pressure of the subjects while these subjects remain at home.