# Nanoengineering Renal Replacement Therapy

> **NIH NIH R56** · UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA · 2022 · $100,000

## Abstract

End stage renal disease (ESRD) is currently responsible for ~50,000 deaths annually in the US. The number of patients with ESRD is progressively increasing, with diabetes and high blood pressure being the two leading causes. The standard care for these patients is lifelong hemodialysis (HD) treatment thrice weekly, but dialysis poorly mimics the natural kidney function. Filtering the blood for only 12 hours per week with dialysis is both non-physiological and inadequate. More frequent dialysis is preferred, as it allows steady waste and fluid removal resulting in superior metabolic and hemodynamic control. As patients are shifted from the typical thrice-weekly regime to one of daily in-home dialysis, significant improvements in the clinical outcome and the quality of life are reported. However, the implementation of daily dialysis on a large scale is difficult. Some of these are the inability or unwillingness of patients to dialyze at home, the lack of staffing both in nurses and technicians to provide more treatments in the dialysis units, and the reluctance of governmental payers to shoulder the expense of more frequent dialysis. In 2018, the Medicare spending alone on CKD and ESRD patients was about $120 billion. To address this great health and societal challenge, miniaturization of components and systems and reducing complexity while ensuring safety are at the heart of dialysis research and development efforts. One of the key barriers is the limitations of the current membrane technology. The current membrane module is bulky, needing an extracorporeal blood circuit consisting of meters of tubing, a pump, and other auxiliary components. Establishing the blood circuit for each dialysis session must be done by a qualified person and presents a major risk factor hampering efforts on expanding in-home frequent dialysis and patient’s independence. To address patients’ safety concerns (through reducing/eliminating the risk of bleeding), enhance affordability in the US and throughout the world and enable new vascular access options, under a recent R21 project, we have nanoengineered a new membrane that is 40x more permeable than the high-flux commercial membranes. This new membrane has demonstrated excellent sieving performance, enabling breakthrough reduction of the dialyzer size by two orders of magnitude such that it can be directly connected to the vascular access eliminating the extracorporeal blood circuit and pump (the dialyzer can be operated using just arterial blood pressure) alleviating the fear of exsanguination that is impeding the growth of in-home dialysis. The overarching objective of the proposed research is to evaluate the hydrodynamic performance of a new microfluidic dialyzer model for incorporation of the new high throughput nanomembrane and evaluate differences in flow regime relative to conventional hollow fiber membrane dialyzers.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10690367
- **Project number:** 1R56DK132297-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
- **Principal Investigator:** Saeed Moghaddam
- **Activity code:** R56 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $100,000
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2022-09-23 → 2024-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10690367

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10690367, Nanoengineering Renal Replacement Therapy (1R56DK132297-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-21 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10690367. Licensed CC0.

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