iHemo Dialysis System

I’m not going to comment on the fad of naming products iXxx after Apple’s iPod/iPhone/iPad/iMac.

This is something that came out of UCSF’s Kidney Project. I made a post at the beginning of the year. Over the years, I’ve made some donations to the project but I’m always disappointed in the lack of progress and funding by the government. Pur government spend a ton of money on all sorts of useless crap but can’t find a few million dollars for artificial kidney research that will save billion? Anyway, I read earlier that the project has made some progress on the actual filtering membrane but not the challenge of making a self-contained unit that drains waste to the bladder. I guess this is a good compromise for now. From what I read, they can implant the filtering device inside the patient’s body, then connect to catheters that will drain toxins and excess fluids using an external pump. This means no needles and no blood outside the body. It’s almost like peritoneal dialysis but with the diffusion filtering done in the implanted unit instead of using your abdominal membrane. Here is an intro video:

It’s not the same as a full implantable artificial kidney but it’s a good first step. It was enough for them to win a $500k KidneyX prize. As far as I know, the UCSF-Vanderbuilt project is the only one of it’s kind. There seems to be no one working on this issue.

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I stand corrected. There seems to be a lot of participants in the KidneyX competition. Hopefully some or many will develop into something viable for use to treat kidney failure.