Lynda Frassetto, M.D., Professor of Medicine at University of California, San Francisco, talks about an artificial kidney that may be replacing the need for a kidney transplant.
Interview conducted by Ivanhoe Broadcast News in August 2016.
Tell me a little bit about the state of kidney disease today and the need for an artificial kidney?
Dr. Frassetto: In the United States, the main reasons you have kidney disease and end up on dialysis are because of high blood pressure, diabetes and really bad blood vessel disease. When you have really bad blood vessel disease it affects your entire body, your heart, your brain and your kidneys. A lot of our people are really sick and they’re also on dialysis. More or less the number of people who are getting sick and being put on dialysis every year is about a hundred thousand. Every year those people who are on dialysis die because they have problems related to diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and strokes. There are a huge number of people who have lots of medical problems who end up on dialysis. The number of people who get transplanted every year has been pretty much the same for many years now, while the number of people on the list waiting for a transplant has been growing every year. Even though they’ve tried new strategies to find more kidneys that they can transplant into people it really isn’t growing very fast; so really there are a lot of people who are waiting for a transplant and there are just no kidneys available.
You said earlier, you were talking about the dialysis center being just like a life support.
Dr. Frassetto: Right, so dialysis does one of the two things that the kidneys normally do and while that’s enough to keep you alive, it’s not really enough to keep you very healthy or feeling very well; it’s just enough to keep you going. The artificial kidney would replace both things that the kidneys do. One, it would take care of the problems better than the kind of dialysis that we do right now. It’s like the next step forward in our ability to dialyze people. Two, it would work twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. This dialysis is being done maybe four hours a day, three times a week and all the rest of the time they’re not getting any dialysis at all. All of the poisons that accumulate in renal failure just build up when you’re not on the dialysis machine. This kind of dialysis can’t remove all those poisons anyway so the artificial kidney would do what your kidney does and it would work all the time. It would just be like having, more or less, just like having a new kidney. I mean really, it would be terrific and since we’re not able to transplant anymore human kidneys because we just haven’t been successful in increasing the number of donations. I mean, really this would allow us to build kidneys and then we could just put them into people. It would just be a totally astounding thing for us to be able to do that.
What would it mean for David?
Dr. Frassetto: Well, for one thing it would mean that you don’t have to come to the dialysis unit the way they do now. This is just like having a job, you know you have to get up in the morning, you have breakfast, and you have to come here. You have to sit here for many hours a day and often when we’re done you’re not feeling very well; then you get a day off and then you’re back here again. Okay, I mean with the artificial kidney it would be inside of you so you could go around and you could do whatever you wanted. You wouldn’t be tied here and you would be feeling much better. I mean it’s a totally different thing and there’s no comparison whatsoever.
Is there anything else that I haven’t asked you about; the impending arrival of the artificial kidney that you would like to get across?
Dr. Frassetto: I think the most important thing here is that it’s still under development. Every year, the investigators have to keep applying for grants to be able to get money to run the studies. It’s very difficult to get the money to actually do the studies, and so if I had to say one thing that is really critically important is that this type of approach of replacing what the kidneys do is absolutely critical to our ability to deliver good health care. It’s really just a question of having the government fund this. I mention this because government funding for research is going down and down, and over the last ten years it’s become progressively more difficult to get money. If I had to say there was one really important thing; it’s that people think that this is an important thing to do. You know that when you tell the government what you know; and that this is something that they want done.
END OF INTERVIEW
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