Shuvo Roy and his team at the Cleveland Clinic are using MEMS to create a bioartificial kidney.

October 25, 2007 — The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering has awarded Cleveland Clinic researcher Shuvo Roy a $3.2 million, three-year grant to develop a MEMS-based bioartificial kidney that can be used instead of dialysis.

Roy and his team are using MEMS technology to create an implantable, self-regulating bioartificial kidney that will filter toxins and absorb necessary salts and water like human kidneys. The team includes physicians and engineers from the Lerner Research Institute’s Department of Biomedical Engineering and Cleveland Clinic’s Department of Nephrology.

“We are bringing together the necessary multidisciplinary expertise to focus on critical technical hurdles to develop an implantable hemofilter and cell bioreactor, which are the integral components of the bioartificial kidney,” Roy said in a news release.

More than 50 million dialysis procedures are performed annually in the United States, according to data from the United States Renal Data System. The treatment of choice, kidney transplant, is severely limited by scarcity of donor organs. Only 25 percent of patients on the waiting list for a transplant survive long enough to receive a kidney.

An implantable bioartificial kidney could substitute for kidney transplantation, giving giving hope, independence and mobility to more than 300,000 patients who now need to come into a center three times a week for dialysis.

Roy’s grant is one of four awarded by NIBIB’s Quantum Grants program.