Cleveland Clinic researcher Shuvo Roy and group will use a $3.2 million grant to commercialize work on an artificial kidney.

The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering has awarded Cleveland Clinic biomedical engineer Shuvo Roy a $3.2 million, three-year grant to develop an artificial kidney to replace dialysis. Roy and his team, physicians and engineers from the Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, are using MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) to create an implantable, self-regulating kidney that will filter toxins and absorb salts and water as human kidneys do. Researchers William Fissell and Aaron Fleischman are also involved in the project. “We are bringing together the multidisciplinary expertise to focus on critical hurdles in developing an implantable hemofilter and cell bioreactor, which are the components of an artificial kidney,” says Roy.

The implantable kidney could substitute for a kidney transplant, thereby helping more than 300,000 patients presently tied to thrice-weekly in-center dialysis.

More than 50 million dialysis procedures are performed annually in the U.S., according to the U.S. Renal Data System. Although the treatment of choice is a kidney transplant, scarce donor organs limit transplants. Only 25% of patients on the waiting list for a transplant survive long enough to receive a kidney.