Artificial Kidney Research Advances Through UCSF Collaboration

UCSF News reports on the latest developments in the quest to create a surgically implantable artificial kidney and the award of a $6 million NIH grant to a research team led by Shuvo Roy, Ph.D., Professor of Bioengineering & Surgery, Director of the Biodesign Laboratory at Mission Bay, and Engineering Director of the UCSF Surgical Innovations Program, and Vanderbilt University nephrologist William Fissell, MD.

Development of a surgically implantable, artificial kidney – a promising alternative to kidney transplantation or dialysis for people with end-stage kidney disease – has received a $6 million boost, thanks to a new grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), one of the National Institutes of Health, to researchers led by UC San Francisco bioengineer Shuvo Roy, PhD, and Vanderbilt University nephrologist William Fissell, MD.

“We aim to conduct clinical trials on an implantable, engineered organ in this decade, and we are coordinating our efforts with both the NIH and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration,” Roy said.

Roy is a professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences in the Schools of Pharmacy and Medicine, and technical director of The Kidney Project at UCSF, a multi-institutional collaboration. The Kidney Project team has prototyped and begun testing key components of the coffee-cup-sized device, which mimics functions of the human kidney.

Roy and Fissell will present updates on development of the device November 3-8 at Kidney Week 2015 in San Diego, part of a major meeting of the American Society of Nephrology.

The Department of Surgery has assembled a working group of faculty from transplant, vascular, pediatric, general, and cardiac surgery to work out questions pertaining to the surgical implantation of the artificial kidney, such as the optimal vascular interface between the device and native blood supply. Willieford Moses, MD, a resident in the UCSF General Surgery Residency Program, is spending his two research years working with Dr. Roy on surgical considerations for the artificial kidney within the Department of Surgery's Innovation Pathway for research residents.