It’s amazing what some kids can do. If you ever meandered the Westinghouse Science Fair floor (now the Intel Science Fair), with the best of 50 states’ high school ideas, you know what I mean. Sometimes, those things really make a difference in our world.

Way back when dinosaurs were around, I managed to develop a new hemodialyzer. It’s what I wanted to do from the time I was eight years old. I have no clue why (Ok, I loved chemistry, I had a pretty nifty chem lab, was pretty good in math) I wanted to be a chemical engineer that would develop this device- but I did. I’m guessing there was some sort of TV program that touched upon the field, but, as I said, I never recalled what it was- and neither did anyone in my family.

Now, Anya Pogharian (18, now, but 17 when the device was conceived) has just developed a self-contained home dialysis machine. Her idea came about because she had been volunteering at a dialysis unit near her home in Montreal (Canada). And, when it came time to produce a science fair project, one that involved 10 hours of work, she took on the concept of developing an improved system. And, then found herself spending some 300 hours developing the device that cost about $ 500 in parts.

She managed to get the interest of Baxter (Canada), who provided some funds used to develop the concept. As did Hema-Quebec (a non-profit, that administers blood products and human tissue- and the safety of the blood supply- in Quebec), which offered Anya an internship that would let her test her concept ex-vivo.

(Medical product testing usually starts out using water and synthetics. Hema-Quebec afforded Anya the ability to test her unit on (outdated) blood, the real thing, to determine if it would work as intended. Since this is NOT inside the human body, it is called ex-vivo. The next steps should involve human testing, which is called in-vivo testing.)

She tested her device using 4 liters of blood. She was under the (mistaken) impression that cleansing the blood would take four hours. But, the process was complete in 25 minutes.

But, as I said, she was mistaken. If you remember my post of a few weeks ago about kt/V, the tried and true KPI for adequate dialysis, you will remember that the dialysis process not only cleans the patient’s blood- but must deal with all the body fluids, since urea, creatinine, and the other toxins are spread over the whole fluid space of the body (including the brain). That space is significantly larger than the four liters of blood she tested. And, the body fluid cleansing is effected via the diffusion that occurs between the various fluid spaces in the body.

So, the exact time for complete blood purification via her dialysis machine can only be discerned later, when the in-vivo testing is effected.

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