Shuvo Roy holds a PhD in electrical engineering. He is a bioengineering specialist currenty based at the university of California, San Francisco.
Shuvo Roy's handiwork may give the world its first implantable artificial kidney, a potential alternative to dialysis and transplants for patients with end-stage kidney failure.
This implantable kidney would include thousands of microscopic filters as well as a bioreactor to perform the metabolic and water-balancing roles just like a real kidney. Devoloping this model is the result of a collaborative effort by engineers, biologists and physicians nationwide, led by Shuvo Roy, PhD, in the UCSF Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences.
A room sized external device was initially the model designed as an artificial kidney and it was finally constricted to the size of a coffee cup that can be implanted in the body to replace the failing kidneys.
The artificial kidney has been tested successfully on a small number of animals. Large-scale trials on animals and humans are expected over the next five years. Once available, and if affordable, this creation by the Roy's team at the university of Califiornia will do away with the need for kidney dialysis.
This will be a boon for all patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). At present in India, out of the 1.5 lakh new patients who suffer from end-stage renal failure annually, only 3,500 get kidney transplants and upto 6,000 to 10,000 undergo dialysis. The rest die out of kidney failure due to an acute shortage of dialysis centres or the lack of specialists to manage the dialysis process.
The main reason why this artificial kidney will be a real breakthrough as per the experts in India is because it will be able to mimic the vital functions of a kidney like regulation of blood pressure and produce vitamin D which may not be feasible by a dialysis machine.