Nephrologist William Fissell IV, M.D., associate professor of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering, is intent on creating and mass-producing an implantable bioartificial kidney that can transform quality of life and prospects for survival for people with chronic kidney disease who would otherwise be forced onto dialysis.
Donor kidneys are in very short supply for the approximately 600,000 Americans who have end-stage renal disease. Only 50 percent of dialysis patients are still alive three years after the start of therapy for kidney disease, compared with 91 percent survival at three years for those who instead receive a preemptive kidney transplant.
Dialysis costs $80,000 per patient per year, and the total U.S. cost for treatment of end-stage renal disease is upward of $40 billion.
Vanderbilt and the University of California at San Francisco are the lead institutions for development of the bioartificial kidney. Fissell, who relocated from the Cleveland Clinic to Vanderbilt last August, has invested years of groundwork in the device, in collaboration with bioengineer Shuvo Roy, Ph.D., of UCSF, and other far-flung researchers.