UCSF – The Kidney Project

I occasionally donate to The Kidney Project at UCSF. I think over the past three years, I’ve donated $600 which is not very much. They have a website that’s not updated regularly but I found out they also have a Facebook page.

One of the recent posts is a year-end message from the two directors. I didn’t know that the project is a joint effort between UCSF and Vanderbilt University. In the comments, someone asked about how President Trump’s Executive Order 13879 has impacted the project and artificial kidney research. Unfortunately, the answer is not very much. It seems like even though the intent is there, there is too much government bureaucracy and political badwill to get anything done so far. Dialysis costs Medicare about $28 billion per year so the potential savings are huge, not to mention the improvement to patients’ lives. I can totally see people in Washington though saying, “Trump, bad!” and blocking everything he proposes. Reading the Facebook post, it’s disheartening to see that the first human trials won’t likely happen until 5 years later as they wait for funding and FDA approval.

The first clinical trial will test a small-scale version of the hemofilter in an external dialysis circuit to ensure the device material is suitable for human use. This trial had been planned for 2018, but due to the delays we experienced we now expect to start next year, in 2020. We will then look at the safety and performance of the implanted clinical-scale hemofilter, followed by evaluation of the integrated device (hemofilter + bioreactor) to show efficacy of the clinical-scale bioartificial kidney. We hope to arrive at this later stage of clinical trials in 5 years or less, assuming sufficient funding and no unanticipated scientific, technical, or regulatory setbacks.

Maybe all those bureaucrats should experience kidney failure and dialysis to light a fire under their asses to move quickly on this and other projects, and to provide some funding. It’s totally pathetic that UCSF has to count on private donations to make progress, and they’ve only raised $15 million to date. Just wanted to point out $15 million is ~0.05% of $25 billion.

As mentioned in a previous post, the deadline for me is 10-15 years, assuming I get a donated kidney soon. That’s when the first transplant will likely fail and I will need to go back on dialysis and start the transplant wait clock again. A working artificial kidney at that time would be great.