Since Organ Markets Are a Little Slow in Coming…
…the good people at UCLA's med school are on the job.
An automated, wearable kidney should be coming to market in the not-too-distant future. This is huge news for people with failing kidneys, who currently have to spend hours at a time hooked up to a stationary dialysis machine, often several days a week. Better still, since this model works 24 hours a day like healthy kidneys do, patients will be getting better treatment in a tinier, more convenient package.
"What's really new about it is the patient's freedom," Martin Roberts, co-designer of the device and an assistant professor of clinical medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a dialysis consultant with the Veterans Affairs Los Angeles Healthcare system, said in a university news release. "To me, as the inventor, the most important thing for the patients is their freedom. The next important thing is that because it's working all the time instead of intermittently, you can do a much better job of treating the patient. So we expect the patient to feel better and live longer."
It would still be nice, though, to legally buy a kidney if yours don't work so well. But don't just take my word for it, ask Drew Carey:
