Jeff's Journal

Biomimicry

Yesterday was another Saturday at the clinic. Saturdays are the tough days. This is the time I feel tethered. The youngest one has been in The Battle At the Beach baseball tournament in Galveston this weekend. (His team won the tournament. I made the Friday night game and was a little tied up on Saturday. I tried one game Sunday, but the heat wore me out. I had to leave.) Back to being tethered. Those tubes which take my blood to and from the machine don’t stretch to Galveston, much less the Texas Hill Country, Colorado or the list of other places I’d rather be. This is when I loathe this disease.

I looked at my PDA on Saturday and noticed my calendar did not include the appointment at the clinic. When I checked it out, I had set the dialysis appointment to end on July 22, thinking there would be a transplant by that time. I missed that one. I have since reset the calendar with no end date set.

Word came back from the transplant team about Donor #9. He and I had a negative cross match. We are now in stage three. He is back from vacation and has started stage three testing. He has more tests next week. We are at the point where Donor #8 failed. I have learned not to sit on the edge of my seat with the testing of donors, but this seems cautiously hopeful.

Since this thing is not going away, I have increased my hunt for alternative treatment research. And as long as we are cautiously hopeful, there are some potential breakthroughs on the horizon in the field of biomimicry that could be helpful for folks like me. Biomimicry has been around a while as many devices we employ every day resemble the human and nature's form, but now scientists are attempting to mimic the biochemistry of nature.

Biophiltre, a Burlingame, California company, is working towards the development of a “renosphere.” This will be a nano sized filtration device modeled on the filtering function of cell membranes. The first application will be tiny “renospheres” that, when injected into the bloodstream, could filter waste, potentially eliminating the need for artificial kidney dialysis.

My head goes lots of places with this idea. There is the hopeful thought of WOW! And then the flip thought of how to program and monitor differentiation of task at the nano level. What will prevent these devices from filtering out necessary elements of the blood? Or coagulating platelets? But to be free from the tether, without immune suppressants, that is a great thought.

posted by Jeff Waldo @ 9:41 PM