News & Events: Artficial Kidney

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, have bypassed external devices and instead focused on developing a kidney prototype that they hope will one day be surgically implanted into a patient's body. It wouldn't require a pump because it would be attached to key arteries and powered by blood pressure, says Vanderbilt nephrologist William Fissell, who co-directs the research with UCSF's Shuvo Roy.

The Kidney Project, a national effort to develop an implantable bioartificial kidney that could eliminate the need for dialysis, announced a key milestone in a November 7 presentation at the American Society of Nephrology Kidney Week 2019 conference in Washington, DC. The project team reported that UC San Francisco scientists successfully implanted a prototype kidney bioreactor containing functional human kidney cells in large animals without significant safety concerns. The device, which is about the size of a deck of cards, did not trigger an immune reaction or cause blood clots, an [...]

As one of 15 inaugural winners of the KidneyX Redesign Dialysis Phase I competition, announced April 29, 2019 in Washington DC, a team led by UCSF's Shuvo Roy, PhD, and VUMC nephrologist William Fissell, MD, will receive $75,000 to accelerate the development of their proposed implantable dialysis device. More importantly, they will work closely with leadership of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Medicare, and HHS to accelerate the translation of their concept into a patient-ready device. KidneyX will award $500,000 to three teams as part of Phase II of the competition in the [...]

Kidney failure is a debilitating and ultimately deadly illness, and a health policy crisis. With 468,000 people on dialysis in the U.S., costing the government $31 billion dollars a year, very little money is spent on researching alternatives to current treatments. Wired magazine's Megan Molteni visited Shuvo Roy, PhD, to check in on the progress of the implantable artificial kidney, which has been in the works for more than 20 years. Roy is a faculty member in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, a joint department of the UCSF Schools of Pharmacy and [...]

The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), one of the National Institutes of Health, has awarded bioengineering professor Shuvo Roy, PhD, a three-year, $2.4 million grant to develop a bioartificial pancreas for treatment of Type 1 Diabetes. The project is a collaboration between the Department of Surgery, Department of Bioengineering & Therapeutic Sciences, and Diabetes Center at UCSF. Co-investigators include: Tejal Desai, PhD - Department of Bioengineering & Therapeutic Sciences Matthias Hebrok, PhD - Diabetes Center at UCSF Andrew Posselt, MD, [...]

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 [...]