Functional Dialysis Machine!

A 17 year old student built a functional dialysis machine prototype for $500 using accessible components and open engineering principles and in doing so exposed the single most uncomfortable truth in medical device economics which is that the cost of building the machine and the cost of buying the machine from an established manufacturer exist in entirely different universes. Dialysis treatment costs patients and healthcare systems thousands of dollars per session. The core technology keeping a kidney failure patient alive was just prototyped by a teenager for less than a used smartphone. Kidney disease affects over 800 million people worldwide and access to dialysis in lower income countries is so limited that patients who could survive with treatment do not receive it. A $500 prototype does not immediately solve that crisis but it proves the crisis is not an engineering problem. It is a pricing problem dressed up as one and a 17 year old with $500 and enough determination just made that distinction impossible to argue against. The medical device industry has spent decades explaining why dialysis machines cost what they cost. This student spent considerably less time building one.