Currently, there are over 100,000 patients on the kidney transplant waiting list, while only around 17,000 patients receive a transplant every year. A device is in development by a team of scientists at Vanderbilt University in Nashville to try and eliminate this organ shortage.  They are developing an implantable artificial kidney that uses microchip filters and live kidney cells to clean the blood. The microchips are made out of the same silicon elements that are used in computers. Each microchip filter contains pores that hold living kidney cells that mimics the kidney’s function of cleaning waste and fluids from the blood. [...]

"I like pigs.  Dogs look up to us, cats look down on us, pigs treat us as equals.” -Winston Churchill Could pigs be the answer to kidney replacements? Pig kidneys are roughly the same size as human kidneys. Testing in the past has been limited to rodent sized kidneys without much success.  Recently, testing with pig kidneys has proven more likely to match human needs for kidney replacement. Researchers are currently using only the structure of the pig kidney and filling in that structure with the recipient’s own cells to create a kidney that would not be rejected.  If proven successful, [...]