Regenerative medicine has a great potential for increasing people’s lives and improving their health. Creating artificial organs is an important area of regenerative medicine, because they can alleviate a lot of current health problems for people who need transplantations. This type of organs can ‘buy time’ until the tissue engineered organs are being developed.
The device, which would include thousands of microscopic filters as well as a bioreactor to mimic the metabolic and water-balancing roles of a real kidney, is being developed in a collaborative effort by engineers, biologists and physicians nationwide, led by Shuvo Roy, PhD, in the UCSF Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences.
Maria Konovalenko 