There are over 100 thousand people awaiting a kidney transplant in the United States, and someone is added to that list every fourteen minutes [1]. The average wait-time for a kidney is between three and five years, and thirteen people die everyday waiting to receive a transplant [1].
The organ shortage in the United States leaves thousands of patients on dialysis while they wait to receive a new kidney, but scientists may have solved this problem by developing the world’s first artificial kidney.
The Kidney Project
William Fissel from Vanderbilt University and Shuvo Roy from the University of California, San Francisco have launched the Kidney Project to address the shortage of kidney donations in the United States [2].
They have developed an artificial kidney that uses living kidney cells along with specialized microchips that are powered by the heart to perform the actions of a healthy kidney [2].
