The days of hemodialysis patients spending hours upon hours sitting
in a hospital lounge while waiting for their blood to be cleaned could
soon be a thing of the past — assuming, of course, that the world’s
first wearable artificial kidney passes FDA muster later this year.
Dubbed the Wearable Artificial Kidney (the WAK), this device is the
result of more than a decade of development by teams at Cedars-Sinai
Medical Center, Los Angeles, and the David Geffen School of Medicine at
UCLA, led by Victor Gura. It is, quite simply, a miniaturised dialysis
machine small enough to wear on a toolbelt, simple enough to port in
with a standard catheter, and light enough to wear all day. It works
just like a conventional dialysis machine — dirty blood is sucked out of
your body, pressed through a series of molecular filters to sieve out
the waste, then pumped back in — and on the same schedule as a
conventional dialysis machine — three four-hour sessions every week —
except instead of weighing 90kg and resembling a filing cabinet, the WAK
weighs 4.5kg and fits around your waist.
The system will be put to the test as part of the FDA’s Innovation
Pathway program — one designed to fast-track promising medical
technologies — later this year in Seattle. This will be the WAK’s third
set of human trials (limited studies have been performed in the UK and
Italy) and the first held in the US. Should it gain FDA approval, Gura’s
team plans to further streamline the unit’s physical features as well
as stretch the cleaning cycle out to 24 hours so it behaves like more
like a real kidney. And, best of all, it gives you a decent argument for
calling yourself a cyborg while you wear it.
