A researcher at the University of Saskatchewan is working on a way to make kidney dialysis more comfortable for patients.
The research is developing a new type of membrane that would be used to filter patients’ blood during hemodialysis. The new filter would reduce side effects from which many kidney patients suffer.
Amira Abdelrasoul is an associate professor at the USask College of Engineering. She got interested in kidney research after a close family member died of kidney failure.
“It was hard to see it happen before my eyes. They tried kidney dialysis on him, but it was so painful for him that he could only do it for a week. He even went into shock during the treatment. That is when I became passionate to try and solve this problem,” Abdelrasoul said.
Chronic kidney disease has no cure and only 43 per cent receive a kidney transplant. The remaining 57 per cent rely on life-sustaining hemodialysis.
Kidney dialysis is not without risk or side effects. According to Abdelrasoul, patients could suffer from blood clots, anemia, blood poisoning, heart inflammation, infections and sleep problems.
“By finding out which proteins cause issues, we can develop new filter membranes that would reduce many of these issues and improve patient comfort.”
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To find the proteins causing trouble, Abdelrasoul developed a way to label and track the movement of specific blood proteins by using customized gold nanoparticles of different sizes and shapes. She then visualized the proteins using the biomedical imaging and therapy beamline at USask’s Canadian Light Source, the resident particle accelerator.
This allowed her to discover how current hemodialysis filters interacted with proteins and where issues could arise. Her findings were published in the prestigious journal, Nature, on Feb. 11th.
It would take a few more years of additional studies and medical trials to get a new type of membrane to market.
However, Abdelrasoul’s long-term goal is to develop an artificial wearable kidney.
“Such an artificial kidney could help the shortage of kidney’s and would improve the quality of life and survival rate of kidney patients,” she said.
At the moment, she is still working on improving the membrane so it can be universally applied to any patient, regardless of blood type, biological sex, age or pre-existing conditions.
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