91–97 of 97 posts
This would be awesome. I helped architect and design the Outset Tablo hemodialysis machine, have designed several LVAD/Artificial hearts and a few other dialysis related systems. This is the ultimate goal, would be amazing improvement for patient quality of life. God speed to this team!!
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They have one in a brain dead patient right now, been over a month with no issues.
Did the patient donate his body to science or something? What’s the legality and ethics of operating on a neurologically dead person?
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What does that scenario look like in practice? Suppose I'm the evil coercing person. I have an artificial kidney and $X, you have (still in your body) a real kidney, and you're short of money so you prefer (artificial kidney + $X) to (real kidney). We make the trade. Why would I do that? Presumably so that I can (evilly) treat someone with kidney disease by giving them a real kidney, which they prefer to an artificia…
We have already seen this. In Iran you can buy a kidney for $5000, which is around 2 years of rent in the country. So I'd argue it's substantial but not really life changing.
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What does it matter who loses money? This isn't a 3 person scam, there are 10s of thousands of people capable and it only takes a single company getting a single practice in the area to start doing ${RADICALLY_MORE_EFFECTIVE_THING} and they get all of the pie while these stagnant people now get none. If there is some grand conspiracy of how they have enough power to prevent anybody from coming in and doing it better/…
>> This isn't a 3 person scam, there are 10s of thousands of people capable and it only takes a single company getting a single practice in the area to start doing ${RADICALLY_MORE_EFFECTIVE_THING} This isnt an iOS app where 10,000 developers compete to bring prices down. This is medicine. You cant just compete, the Nephrology Board has to approve these standards of practice. Funny, they also benefit when there isnt…
In regards to "tackling it in another way", more than market efficiency goes into play of how expensive something is. Lots of people can build houses, that doesn't mean houses are now $10 it means houses aren't 500,000,000 dollars because one guy can build them and wants to make 1,000x margin each time. I'm not sure what programmers or software has to do with it, billions are spent on that as well it's not just free. FWIW I come from a healthcare background, not a software one.
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But they did successfully isolate the epithelial cells from the immune system, as claimed above. And those cells survived for a week and managed to "mimic several important kidney functions." I don't see how they could have survived if they weren't exposed to blood. The filter won't be biological, so that part shouldn't trigger an immune response either.
Well they were “exposed” through a silicon membrane - but the point that were not exposed to whole blood. So the two questions on feasibility is how massive does this have to be to get effective filtration without resorting to pumping, and the thrombosis question. They discuss the methods - they last for 7 days but will they last for 7 years? 7 weeks? There’s just a ton of stuff between this experiment and a fully fu…
They do say patients would still need EPO injections, since the device doesn't contain the type of cells required for that. And with sufficient funding they're still 4-5 years away from clinical trials, so they seem to agree there's a lot of work to go.
This probably isn't a viable solution for my father who has been on dialysis for 2 years and is in ESRD. I am a candidate for a kidney transplant for him (I went through the whole process), but he has other issues that have been preventing him from having another surgery. I'm pretty scared to do the procedure, too. But really glad to see progress being made here. Hopefully, also, the world works toward improving diet…
I've looked at this from a fathers perspective and have made the decision that no matter how much my kids may be a good match I would never want to be a donor recipient from them. That short-circuits a lot of ethical dilemmas around such a decision and making that decision well before it would ever come into play makes it a lot easier. My eldest one day said he'd gladly give up a kidney for me and it caused me to thi…
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Yep, this has been 5 years away for the past 20 years.
What hasn't existed for the past 20 years: an artificial kidney device that works in pigs for at least a week.