Experimental Study of a Hybrid Renal Replacement System

Kidney failure is a major issue in the United States. The numbers of kidney failure patients are rapidly increasing with the simultaneous rise in diabetes, obesity and hypertension¹. Kidney transplantation has shown excellent results, but insufficiency of donors has been a limiting factor. Most end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients depend on hemodialysis (HD) for survival which is highly expensive. On an average ESRD patients receive 3 dialysis treatment a week and 4 hours per treatment, i.e., approximately 12 hours a week. Technology has not yet reached to a state where all the kidney functions can be mimicked. The only major kidney function being performed in HD is toxin removal. Even the toxins are not being continuously removed from the patients. To compensate the toxin and fluid removal of a whole week within 12 hours, high volumes of fluid are removed in HD treatments. Patients suffer due to the high fluid removal in a short period of time. Also the patients are restricted from taking fluids between the HD treatments. More frequent HD can improve both survival rate and life quality of patients with chronic kidney disease since normal people has his kidneys functioning continuously. It is a well known fact that daily dialysis offers many benefits over regular intermittent HD¹. But providing daily dialysis is not affordable currently. Therefore, new modes of delivering continuous renal support are required.