Research interest

Kidney failure is rapidly becoming an epidemic in the United States, fueled by epidemic diabetes and obesity, and, paradoxically, improved outcomes in cardiac disease such that more patients with hypertension and diabetes survive to develop kidney failure. Excellent outcomes from renal transplantation are limited by scarcity of donor organs, so that fewer than 20% of patients with kidney failure ever receive a transplant. The majority depend on hemodialysis and suffer extraordinary mortality and morbidity at great expense. The Renal Nanotechnology Laboratory has focused on membrane technology as a limiting step in implantable or wearable therapy for ESRD, because existing dialysis cartridges are physically large and require high pressures for blood circulation. Narrow pore size distributions improve discrimination between filtered and retained molecules and increase hydraulic permeability by allowing the mean pore size to approach the desired cutoff of the membrane, but pores in existing polymeric membranes typically have a broad size distribution and irregular features. An implantable membrane for blood separations such as dialysis or ultrafiltration would enable a paradigm shift in treatment of ESRD.