Amazing Things Podcast
Meet the leaders of today’s scientific revolution, and discover the new technologies allowing scientists to understand and treat disease, improve health, and overcome impossible odds. Today, research funded by the National Institutes of Health is making Amazing Things possible. The Amazing Things Podcast hosted by Adam Belmar is presented by United for Medical Research, a coalition of the nation’s leading scientific research institutions and industries, and health and patient advocates seeking steady, long-term growth in the NIH budget.
Amazing Things Podcast
William Fissell: Giving Kidney Patients Their Quality of Life Back
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United For Medical Research
More than 460,000 Americans have end stage renal disease. While transplant of a human kidney is the best treatment for kidney failure, there simply aren’t enough donor kidneys to go around, leaving the vast majority of these patients tied to dialysis machines for the rest of their lives.Every day 13 people die waiting for a kidney. Vanderbilt University Medical Center nephrologist and associate professor of medicine Dr. William H. Fissell IV and his colleague Dr. Shuvo Roy at the University of California, San Francisco have spent the better part of two decades working on a technology solution to this problem of supply and demand. And now, in 2016, they are closing in on what he calls the “Holy Grail” for people with kidney disease: An implantable artificial kidney.