News & Events: Shuvo Roy, Ph.D.

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, have bypassed external devices and instead focused on developing a kidney prototype that they hope will one day be surgically implanted into a patient's body. It wouldn't require a pump because it would be attached to key arteries and powered by blood pressure, says Vanderbilt nephrologist William Fissell, who co-directs the research with UCSF's Shuvo Roy.

The Kidney Project, a national effort to develop an implantable bioartificial kidney that could eliminate the need for dialysis, announced a key milestone in a November 7 presentation at the American Society of Nephrology Kidney Week 2019 conference in Washington, DC. The project team reported that UC San Francisco scientists successfully implanted a prototype kidney bioreactor containing functional human kidney cells in large animals without significant safety concerns. The device, which is about the size of a deck of cards, did not trigger an immune reaction or cause blood clots, an [...]

As one of 15 inaugural winners of the KidneyX Redesign Dialysis Phase I competition, announced April 29, 2019 in Washington DC, a team led by UCSF's Shuvo Roy, PhD, and VUMC nephrologist William Fissell, MD, will receive $75,000 to accelerate the development of their proposed implantable dialysis device. More importantly, they will work closely with leadership of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Medicare, and HHS to accelerate the translation of their concept into a patient-ready device. KidneyX will award $500,000 to three teams as part of Phase II of the competition in the [...]

Michael Harrison, MD, Professor Emeritus of Surgery, Pediatrics, Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Shuvo Roy, PhD, Professor of Bioengineering & Therapeutic Sciences at UCSF, and James Wall, MD, Assistant Professor of Surgery at Stanford University have been awarded a five-year $6.7 million Pediatric Device Consortia (PDC) P50 grant from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The UCSF-Stanford PDC is one of five centers selected to participate in the national program aimed at accelerating the development [...]

UCSF Surgical Innovations and San Francisco-based medical device developer TheraNova have formed a partnership that will allow for co-development of medical device technologies between them. UCSF innovators will now have a streamlined mechanism to collaborate with TheraNova engineers, which will help speed commercialization of products. The agreement formalizes a longstanding collaborative relationship between Surgical Innovations and TheraNova, providing access to the respective expertise and capabilities of each group, notably: The partnership agreement establishes mechanisms for [...]

Academic hospitals have all the makings for rich medical device development. They have physicians to identify surgical needs, researchers to test theories, bioengineers to design and create devices and patients to participate in clinical trials. However, the disconnect between engineering and surgical departments makes innovation a challenge. So does surgeons' all-consuming job Number One—treating patients. Providing the Infrastructure for Surgeons to Innovate Surgical Innovations, part of the University of California, San Francisco's Department of Surgery and Bioengineering & [...]

Kidney failure is a debilitating and ultimately deadly illness, and a health policy crisis. With 468,000 people on dialysis in the U.S., costing the government $31 billion dollars a year, very little money is spent on researching alternatives to current treatments. Wired magazine's Megan Molteni visited Shuvo Roy, PhD, to check in on the progress of the implantable artificial kidney, which has been in the works for more than 20 years. Roy is a faculty member in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, a joint department of the UCSF Schools of Pharmacy and [...]

The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), one of the National Institutes of Health, has awarded bioengineering professor Shuvo Roy, PhD, a three-year, $2.4 million grant to develop a bioartificial pancreas for treatment of Type 1 Diabetes. The project is a collaboration between the Department of Surgery, Department of Bioengineering & Therapeutic Sciences, and Diabetes Center at UCSF. Co-investigators include: Tejal Desai, PhD - Department of Bioengineering & Therapeutic Sciences Matthias Hebrok, PhD - Diabetes Center at UCSF Andrew Posselt, MD, [...]

The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) has awarded the UCSF Department of Surgery a five-year interdisciplinary R25 research education grant for its Biodevice Innovation Training Program. The grant will fund up to two surgical residents each year with an interest in pursuing translational medicine, medical device development, and entrepreneurship during their dedicated research years. The Biodevice Innovation Training Program is led by Professors Hanmin Lee, MD, and Shuvo Roy, PhD, who are also co-directors of the Surgical Innovations Program. Research mentors [...]