Gradipore prepares technology for dialysis work

Sydney-based biotech Gradipore is adapting its Gradiflow technology to help treat patients with kidney failure.

Dr Hari Nair, CEO of Gradipore Inc, based in New York, said successful animal trials had put the Gradiflow separation technology on the road to approval for treating kidney failure in humans.

The trials, carried out by 10 researchers at the University of NSW showed that Gradiflow could be used as a "bio-compatible" renal dialysis device in sheep models.

Assoc Prof Anne Simmons, at UNSW Biomedical Engineering, said the sheep study was so successful that the university was proposing to conduct ex-vivo human clinical trials of the technology.

In the experiments, blood is taken out of the sheep and pumped around in a circuit that passes through the Gradiflow system and back into the jugular vain. Standard pathology and liver function analysis is than carried out to ensure that the device is working.

In humans, the device is plugged into a vein of a patient and then run as a dialysis machine to filter out blood toxin products caused by renal failure.

"Gradiflow technology can remove toxins from the blood far more efficiently than any current dialysis machine," Nair said. It would greatly improve the quality of life for patients because they would only require the Gradiflow dialysis machine twice a week, he said.

The UNSW research was funded with an AusIndustry R&D Start grant. It is part of Gradipore's program to establish Gradiflow as a standard biological separation process in therapeutic industrial and research areas.

Gradiflow is currently used for analysis in research laboratories for purification of blood products, proteins or charged molecules.

"It will be adopted by multinationals, such as Aventis, for use in blood fractionation," Nair said.