EINDHOVEN, the Netherlands — Frank Simonis hopes to use nanoparticles and electronics to shift dialysis from the hospital to the home.
The Dutch researcher is developing a wearable dialysis system that can clean the blood for up to a year without a doctor’s intervention, skipping lengthy and costly trips to a hospital for dialysis on relatively bulky systems. It uses a combination of four absorbent nanoparticles, two of which Simonis discovered himself.
A doctor would insert at a clinic one end of a tube into a patient’s vein and the other into the wearable device. It would draw blood continuously, running it through four membranes coated with the nanoparticles to separate blood from plasma, clean the plasma and return it to the patient’s body.
The device would use electric current about once every four hours to clean the absorbent particles. The nanoparticle would last for up to a year before the patient would have to return to a clinic to have them refreshed.
Simonis hopes to do animal trials on his prototype device next year. He has started a collaboration with other researchers to develop wireless networking capabilities for the system so a doctor could remotely monitor its progress.
If all goes well Simonis’ startup, called Nanodialysis will have a final system on the market in 2014. He gives a tour of his work in the video below. The company is one of about 90 startups in the High Tech Campus Eindhoven, a tech park created on the Philips Research campus in 2003 to attract startups and act as home for spinoffs of Philips’ own research.
Video:
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