When Orlando got back to Miami from almost a year of working as an expert welder in Western Virginia last Spring, I was shocked at his physical appearance. Although he is relatively young at 45, he looked beat. It turned out he was diagnosed with kidney problems. For awhile, it looked like he was successfully fighting the deterioration of his kidneys (genetic since his mother also suffered from kidney failure) by taking baking soda. However, last Christmas Day while I was staying at his home in Miami, he woke up in extreme pain and had to be taken to the hospital. Not long after that he was put on dialysis. We spent New Year's Eve at Jackson Memorial Hospital with him. (I brought a bottle of champagne there but he could not drink it).
Anyway, he will do anything to get off dialyses so I began investigating and found some info, including this article (and video) about bioartificial kidneys. Perhaps I am wrong but it seems only a few months away from becoming a reality as an implant.
Orlando is willing to take the risk and be among the first bioartificial kidney implant patients.
If anybody out there has info on when these implants can become a reality or other info, please FreepMail me. I would like to get Orlando into a program for this as soon as it can become a reality.
Thanx in advance.
I saw this site and it says it is not yet ready for “standard use”. Your brother-in-law’s best bet is to let his nephrologist know that he is interested in this and find out if the doctor can refer him or possibly point the way to getting on a list of volunteers for any experimental treatments involving the bioartificial kidney.
http://www.med.umich.edu/humes/
Prayers up for your brother-in-law.
bump
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25553375
Front Biosci (Elite Ed). 2015 Jan 1;7:215-28.
Current strategies and challenges in engineering a bioartificial kidney.
Kim S1, Fissell WH1, Humes DH1, Roy S1.
Abstract Renal replacement therapy was an early pioneer in both extra-corporeal organ replacement and whole organ transplantation. Today, the success of this pioneering work is directly demonstrated in the millions of patients worldwide successfully treated with dialysis and kidney transplantation. However, there remain significant shortcomings to current treatment modalities that limit clinical outcomes and quality of life. To address these problems, researchers have turned to using cell-based therapies for the development of a bioartificial kidney. These approaches aim to recapitulate the numerous functions of the healthy kidney including solute clearance, fluid homeostasis and metabolic and endocrine functions. This review will examine the state-of-the-art in kidney bioengineering by evaluating the various techniques currently being utilized to create a bioartificial kidney. These promising new technologies, however, still need to address key issues that may limit the widespread adoption of cell therapy including cell sourcing, organ scaffolding, and immune response. Additionally, while these new methods have shown success in animal models, it remains to be seen whether these techniques can be successfully adapted for clinical treatment in humans.
Doesn't sound like it will be available anytime soon, but I did not read the article, just the abstract.
God bless your brother-in-law.
Just so you understand, medical device clinical trials go through several phases and it can be a long process that lasts anywhere from several years to a decade. Typically Phase 1 will only demonstrate safety for having the device implanted, but not specifically function. The devices may actually be explanted at the end of Phase 1. Usually a Phase 1 trial will be 6 months to a year.
Phase 2 will study efficacy, but the patient exclusion and inclusion criteria will be very strict. This is where patients are selected by how sick they are (sick, but not so sick they won’t benefit or survive the trial period), they don’t have any past or present mitigating disease, they fill a quota by age and gender, they don’t have a history of smoking or drinking, etc. Phase 2 may last a couple of years. Phase 2 may have a randomized control group that gets a sham device with no functionality (but usually not for life-sustaning devices).
If the results from Phase 2 meet the study endpoints and there is money available to continue, the study then goes to Phase 3 and recruits a much larger patient population with less restrictions on exclusion and inclusion. The Phase 3 endpoints need to be achieved and FDA approval needs to be sought and obtained in order to proceed to Phase 4. Phase 3 testing may last a couple more years.
Finally, in Phase 4 the device is commercially produced and made available to the public, but testing for efficacy and safety still continue.