Aimed at enabling kidney failure patients to treat themselves at home, the SC+ machine from Quanta Dialysis Technologies scooped the Royal Academy of Engineering’s 2022 MacRobert Award.
Traditional haemodialysis machines are “the size of a fridge-freezer”, said Quanta’s chief technology officer Professor Clive Buckberry in an academy video. Their size means patients normally visit hospital for treatment, and complicated plumbing within the machines requires regular maintenance.
Instead of three four-hour hospital visits per week, patients using the compact SC+ device can do their treatment at home, fitting it around their own schedules and extending treatment if needed. That transformative change came from an innovation with an unusual basis – a juice dispensing machine.
Flexible care
Spun out from a larger parent company, Quanta adapted technology from a device that reconstituted orange juice at fast food outlets. Weighing just 32kg, the SC+ system operates using a proprietary single-use cartridge that eliminates the need for expensive and time-consuming disinfection between treatments.
The complex tubing inside conventional dialysis machines is “compressed” into the flat cartridge, said Professor Buckberry. Each one incorporates a series of pneumatic membrane pumps, rather than piston-driven pumps.
“This provides highly accurate fluid management and enhanced distribution within the dialyser itself, which acts as an artificial kidney, while minimising cross-contamination and bio-burden (the number of microorganisms living on a non-sterilised surface) between treatments,” an academy announcement said.
The device “is already having a dramatic impact on patient quality of life, since it is easier to operate, faster to train on and as powerful as traditional in-centre dialysis machines,” the announcement added. “This flexibility also enables patients to treat themselves at home overnight, receiving more dialysis care than they would in clinical settings and eliminating the gap where patients go without dialysis over a weekend.”
Lewis Till, a 21-year-old dialysis patient from Wolverhampton, with the Quanta SC+ machine at home
A cloud-based ‘digital health platform’ works alongside the SC+, designed to make managing treatment data, remote patient monitoring, technical support and troubleshooting easier.
The Warwickshire team is already working with NHS Trusts, and provided the health service with its entire UK stock of the SC+ during lockdown to relieve pressure on hospitals.
MacRobert Award judges were impressed by the ‘enormous commercial potential’ of the machine, which is already cleared by the FDA and selling in the US, where the dialysis market is expected to exceed $12bn. In 2021, Quanta raised $245m to fund the US rollout of the SC+ system – the largest-ever private funding round for a dialysis device company.
‘Engineering ingenuity’
The Quanta team was announced winner at the academy’s awards dinner in Leicester Square yesterday (12 July). The team received a £50,000 prize.
“This UK-based global healthtech success story, which traces back to technology first developed for use in fruit juice dispensers, demonstrates remarkable engineering ingenuity,” said Professor Sir Richard Friend FREng FRS, chair of the judging panel.
“Recent success comes on the back of Quanta’s considerable journey as a company. The team has been working for a decade to develop a machine that dramatically improves patient care and quality of life, relieves pressure on hospitals and showcases the enormous commercial potential that cutting edge engineering can unlock. The team exemplifies the persistence, innovation and unconventional thinking that has long been a hallmark of the UK’s greatest engineering success stories, and they are worthy winners of the MacRobert Award.”
Other biomedical winners of the MacRobert Award include EMI in 1972 for the application of X-Ray techniques for diagnosing brain disease, Norton Healthcare in 1998 for a breath-activated asthma inhaler, and Touch Bionics in 2008 for the i-Limb Hand, which helped to transform medical prosthetics.
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.