About the Bio-artificial Hemodialysis Machine
The Bioartificial Hemodialysis Machine is an artificial kidney that mimics the functions of a kidney and is used until the patients receive an actual kidney transplant.
How It Works
Step 1: Blood Entry via Natural Blood Pressure
The patient’s blood flows naturally into the bioartificial kidney, similar to how it would enter a healthy biological kidney. This process uses the patient’s own blood pressure to drive circulation through the device—no external pump or power source is needed. This design makes the device simple, compact, and less vulnerable to mechanical failure or power outages.
Step 3: Biological Processing in the Renal Cell Cartridge
After mechanical filtration, the partially cleaned blood flows into a bioreactor that contains living human renal tubular cells. These cells take over functions that machines alone can't perform, including: reabsorbing essential nutrients and electrolytes (like glucose, sodium, potassium, and calcium), secreting hormones (like erythropoietin for red blood cell production), maintaining pH and acid-base balance, regulating fluid and salt concentrations in a way that adapts to the body’s needs. This step ensures the blood is not only cleaned but also chemically balanced and biologically regulated, just as it would be in a natural kidney.
Step 2: Mechanical Filtration with a Silicon-Based Filter
Once inside the device, the blood first passes through a silicon nanopore membrane that functions like an artificial glomerulus (the natural kidney's filtering unit). This membrane acts as a precise mechanical filter, removing: large waste molecules (like urea and creatinine), excess fluids, toxins, while retaining larger essential components such as: proteins, red and white blood cells, which are too big to pass through the filter and are returned to the bloodstream. This stage mimics the basic filtration of natural kidneys, but with engineered precision.
Step 4: Return of Clean Blood and Waste Elimination
Once fully filtered and balanced, the cleaned blood re-enters the patient’s circulatory system, restoring proper blood chemistry and hydration. Meanwhile, the waste materials and excess water removed during the filtration process are directed
The Benefits
The benefits you can have from this product is it is easily accessible and cheap, gives better chance for survival as patient waits for actual kidney transplant, Small and compact, improves control of blood pressure and electrolyte balance, and EMP attacks will not occur because this machine has no power supply. The
The problem we can solve
The problem that we hope to address through this product is the gender equalities rooted in kidney transplants. Women are less likely to receive an organ donation compared to their counterparts. According to NIH.gov, women donate organs more frequently than men, in 1998 women donated 58% of the organs while the other 42% was men, even though men receive more organs. The solution for this is to create a replica of a kidney that can last long enough just until the candidate gets a real kidney. Not only that, Women generally have smaller kidneys than men, which is why women have a shorter graft survival than men. This is an inequality because it is not fair for the people that are in need of a kidney to get put on the bottom of a list because there are not enough available.