Hemodialysis (HD) is the life-supporting treatment for 2 million patients with chronic kidney failure (CKF), affecting 697.5 million people worldwide. The lack of access to affordable treatment resulted in 1.2 million deaths in 2017. [1] HD replaces kidney functionality, including clearance of uremic toxins (UTs) like urea, creatinine and uric acid from blood, in 2-3 sessions of 4 hours per week.

HD is limited by bottlenecks in water consumption (78.000L of tap-water per year per patient) and UTs removal efficiency. Regenerating water from HD would represent a huge gain in efficiency, sustainability, accessibility, delivery and safety of HD, as well as  allow the scaling down in size of the HD system and building lightweight devices (Wearable Artificial Kidney - WAK), that significantly improve the accessibility of the therapy, but also the patients’ quality of life.

We are developing a novel technology, the mixed matrix membrane adsorber (MMMA), that aims to physically remove UTs, via new composite systems where ultra-high selective sorbent particles are immobilized onto a porous polymeric support. This enables regeneration of the water from HD with a fast dynamic absorption process with low energy consumption.

Related publication Open access "Mixed Matrix Membranes Adsorbers (MMMAs) for the Removal of Uremic Toxins from Dialysate"