Ellen Medical from Sydney in Australia has been selected over 500 other entries from 22 countries to win the top prize for Innovation Booster competition, at the biennial World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH)-2020 held in Doha, Qatar.
Speaking on winning the prize at WISH, which this year was held virtually on account of the ongoing global coronavirus pandemic, the Managing Director of Ellen Medical, John Knight said: “Dialysis has been a safe and effective treatment for kidney failure for over 60 years, but for every patient who gets this treatment, another three will die, because it is just too expensive.”
“Our ‘Affordable Dialysis System’ is not only much cheaper to deliver than standard peritoneal dialysis but also avoids the logistics costs and greenhouse gas burden of transporting thousands of bags of dialysis fluid to remote locations.”
According to Ellen Medical, their device costs under $1,000 to build and $5 a day to run, and has particular usefulness in developing countries. Its portable distiller can clean local potable water into medical-grade sterile water used in point-of-care dialysis bags. It is part of a pack fitting inside a small suitcase that includes water purifier, care station and solar panel.
Ellen Medical was founded as a partnership between The George Institute for Global Health and inventor Vincent Garvey. For his part, the inventor behind the machine said he aims to disrupt traditional haemodialysis. He described currently available dialysis systems, which uses an artificial kidney to process a patient’s blood and return it to the body as, “a $70 billion global industry that should actually be a $7 billion industry”.