There's a lot of exciting stuff happening on human organs and newer, more compact dialysis delivery mechanisms. In the first issue of the HKF newsletter, we had given some details about the Wearable Artificial Kidney. We also mentioned that this was at least a few years away. However, the excitement of getting dialysis where you want and when you want got some people carried away and we started getting calls from hopeful dialysis patients asking for one!

Well, sorry to spoil your party but it will be at least another ten years till people like you and me can have access to this machine.

There is a lot of research and promising stuff on the horizon. Take a look at this linksent by Karthik that talks about growing kidneys among other organs in the lab. They talk about using organs from brain dead people and then washing off or dissolving all the tissues to get the 'scaffold' and then putting cells from our own body on the scaffold to form an organ that will not be rejected by the human body. The program itself says this is decades away.

You know what - sometimes I honestly feel that I should have been born about 25 years later. That way I would have had access to the NxStage System One in India and may be even got a shot at some of these fancy new devices.

All these new devices may just be a little too late for me.