Newly created urea sorbent paves way for wearable artificial kidneys

Since there aren’t enough kidney transplants for millions of patients, scientists have created new urea sorbent that will pave way forward to make wearable artificial kidney with the likelihood of making dialysis more convenient.

The alternative for kidney transplant is for the patients to undergo dialysis that can be cumbersome with poor health outcomes too. Scientists have now created a new urea sorbent that can speed up progress towards the development of lightweight and wearable artificial kidney, enabling to make dialysis more comfortable, effective and convenient.

According to the report published in the journal ACS Nano, the researchers aim to create an artificial kidney that could be worn at all times and will continuously perform dialysis. However, urea, which must be removed to maintain the body’s nitrogen balance, was an obstacle for them since the amount of materials used in current dialysis requires big and heavy equipment to perform urea’s breakdown.

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In order to overcome the hurdle, researchers used a nanomaterial called MXene that is 2D nanosheets of metal carbides. Instead of breaking down the urea, MXene captures it by sandwiching urea molecules between its nanometer-thin layers, detailed Science Daily.

When at room temperature, the nanomaterial could capture 94% of urea from the discarded materials from dialysis machines. When the material was tested at body temperature, MXene captured even more urea. Moreover, the material didn’t even kill cells proving that it could be safe for consumer usage.

According to these tests, scientists figured out that MXene could help turn the concept of a comfortable wearable artificial kidney to reality, easing way for people with renal failures, wrote Phys.org.