Chronic kidney disease is a worldwide and ever-growing health crisis in which end-stage patients largely depend on in-clinic dialysis, which requires them to travel to the hospital/clinic 3 times per week for a 4h dialysis session. This places a heavy burden on the patient’s life and autonomy, and on European health care systems.

KIDNEW develops ground-breaking technology to enable an implantable artificial kidney with better functional kidney replacement therapy (KRT) than currently available, without need for immunosuppressive drugs and at reduced costs.

KIDNEW provides a proof of concept on three breakthrough innovations:

1. Solid-state miniature ultra-high flux silicon (Si)-based filter with a high-density of uniform nanopores through novel block copolymer self-assembly, and with novel hemocompatible biomimetic polymer brush coating connected to a photonic clotting monitoring sensor and (thrombolytic) cleansing tool;
2. Solid-state bioreactor-grown kidney tubule cell monolayers on novel biomimetic Si-wafer based membrane with bioimpedance based monolayer integrity monitoring and monolayer repair functionality using growth-factors;
3. Solid-state integrated functional biohybrid filter and tubule exchange units stacked in parallel in a multichip to demonstrate functional implantable KRT in goats.