Artificial Implantable Kidney Work Imperiled by Funding Worries

An implantable artificial kidney is less than five years from clinical trials in humans, but it’s $11 million short of completing the work to get there and funding options are drying up.

“We can get to the first patient [in a clinical trial] within five years or less with the right amount of focused engineering effort…because it’s not so much a technology limitation as it is a resource limitation,” said Shuvo Roy, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California, San Francisco and technical director of The Kidney Project, which is developing the device.

Despite President Donald Trump’s ...