Background
The kidneys of patients suffering from end stage renal disease (ESRD) are not able to excrete substances that are normally eliminated with the urine. A common treatment option for those patients is hemodialysis which removes these substances, which are called uremic toxins, from the blood by diffusion and filtration.
Dialysis membranes used today remove substances with molecular weight up to 30 or 40 kilodalton.
Aromatic, hydrophobic uremic toxins, such as p-cresyl sulfate and indoxyl sulfate, have a low solubility in water and tend to bind to plasma proteins. These protein-bound uremic toxins (PBUTs) have received extensive attention, as their accumulation leads to multiple toxic biological effects in ESRD patients, while the removal of these solutes by conventional hemodialysis therapies is severely hampered.
Challenge
Our client, a major healthcare company is looking for innovators/experts who can provide means and ways for effectively removing protein-bound uremic toxins from the blood of dialysis patients.
Limits of today techniques:
Due to their protein binding ability, the size of PBUTs complexes makes conventional high flux dialysis techniques ineffective, since the molar weight of the complexes is beyond the exclusion limit of the dialysis membranes used. As a result, only the portion of the relevant uremic toxin that is not bound to proteins can be eliminated.
The protein bound portion (up to more than 90% of the total amount of the uremic toxin) remains essentially unchanged. Consequently, patients suffering from chronic renal failure increasingly developed secondary diseases, such as cardiovascular disease and the other pathological manifestations of end stage renal failure leading to an increased mortality rate.
Therefore, there is a need for new therapeutic strategies to remove hydrophobic protein-bound uremic toxins during hemodialysis.
Solutions must aim to cover the below criteria:
- Does not require injection of any substance in the blood
- Usability - User interaction should be limited and intuitive, not requiring an extended training
- Efficacy – Able to remove at least the 30% of the total amount of PBTU from the blood of the patient
- Continuous PBTU removal during the entire hemodialysis session
- Usability - Does not require user interaction
- Efficacy – Able to remove at least the 50% of the total amount of PBTU from the blood of the patient
What's in it for you?
A successful collaboration could mean, for individuals, becoming part our clients wider group, while for organisations, forming a partnership/joint venture to co-develop and co-launch the idea to market.
This is a global challenge and our client is willing to collaborate with both individuals/freelancers and other industry participants/universities etc. and solutions can be at any stage of development.