 slushies. My name is Morteza Amadi and I'm here to talk to you about artificial kidneys and the story of the company I'm founded to to develop one. We are building artificial kidneys to help patients with kidney failure. Kidney failure is a global issue. About 10% of the whole wolf's population is affected by chronic kidney disease. Now there are about 3 million patients around the world with end-stage renal disease or kidney failure. But what's more important is that 10 times that number would be the number of patients who would not have access to an effective treatment around the world. Most of those patients who have access to treatment either dialysis or kidney transplant would live in countries such as United States, Germany, Japan, Brazil and Italy. And most of those patients who do not have access to an effective treatment would live in China and India. When you look at the waiting list for an organ transplant in the US, you can see that 80% of all patients waiting to receive an organ transplant are waiting to receive kidneys. In the US alone there are about 650,000 patients with kidney failure and there are only 20,000 kidneys available for transplantation. The demand for kidney is so high and the number of donors is so low that patients sometimes have to wait 5 to 7 years to get a transplant. The only option they have to use to survive in those years is dialysis. Dialysis costs about $82,000 per patient per year, which adds up to this huge market size of more than $50 billion per year in the US alone. Dialysis was first invented by Dr. Colf in 1943 and since then the technology hasn't changed much. Let me explain. So initially he was using the sausage skin, the sausage casing as the membrane that's used for cleaning blood and that technology has changed into polymer membranes which are currently in use in blood dialysis. But the machines are fancier, however the technology remains the same. Imagine yourself attached to a huge dialysis machine. It's the size of a fridge three times a week for four hours each time to remove euromic toxins and excess water from your blood. Imagine yourself attached to that machine watching your own blood in circulation in plastic tubes for four hours each time with not much hope for any sort of change in your future. These patients are in pain physically and emotionally. They have the most restricted diet and what's even worse is that the mortality rate of these patients can be as high as 65% in five years. Now what science shows is that for improving survival rate of these patients, you need to provide a more frequent treatment. So instead of providing three times a week access treatment to treatment, science shows that even if you double that to six times a week these patients would live longer and the data collected was collected in 12 months and even in 12 months it was shown that there's improvement in survival rates. That's why we're building an artificial kidney as a variable device, a miniaturized device that patients can carry for blood purification. With our device the patients do not need to go to dialysis clinics anymore and they have access to treatment as frequently as they want. Our device is going to improve the quality of life for these patients significantly. In comparison with the current technology which is dialysis, our device can fit in the palm of your hand and it weighs less than a pound. It's accessible almost everywhere and the patient would be the end user, not the nurses, not the nephrologists. The key technology behind our device is a nanofiltration system which was built according to globalist filtration of kidneys and the outcome is the same. We have used the most blood-friendly material on planet and we have turned that into a porous material and we built nanofilters out of that and we use that in our technology. We have been testing our devices in animal models and I mean in large animal models 65 kilogram pigs. These are animals which are very much similar to human body in terms of size and we have done that at UCLA. Now to do so you need to first submit an application for ethics committee, get the approval and after that you're good to go. After completion of all that process we went ahead with this study and to do this study we first removed the kidneys from the pigs which are six months old 65 kilograms and then we connect the pig to our devices. In the next slide I'm going to show you a very short video clip from one of the experiments we performed. I'm going to take you to real operating room. I'm going to show you our device connected to a pig which is not shown but the animal is covered by a blanket and so you're going to see collection of uremic toxins and fluids using our device from a living animal. These are the samples we collected from that pig. When we looked at the result we confirmed a few points. First of all we established blood flow in the device and then we confirmed the blood filtration of the device and the filters in the device. We also made sure that we are removing about 1.5 liters of fluid from body of animal and that is equivalent of what has to be removed from body of patient every day. We work closely with the Stanford University, UCLA, University of California, everyone in the US and few hospitals in Canada. Our business model is based on providing our devices to distribution channels and renting them for 50 bucks a day and the distribution channel would get reimbursed from insurance companies. Now providing the device for no cost to the patients. It is in the US law that they have to reimburse dialysis. Now based on this model we expect that if we recruit 10,000 patients the company would be generating about $180 million a year. We work closely with FDA and I'm very happy to tell you that we are now completing the process to join expedited access program. In the next couple of years we'll be completing our animal studies and then we'll move forward with clinical studies in 250 patients. We want to bring this device to market in about four years. We have been covered by many media around the world. I wanted to highlight this one. We were covered by Archipelago Spectrum and our project was named as one of the three ways only three ways in the world that people are making artificial kidneys. Now I wanted to also mention that the other two are academic projects. We have been extremely lucky to have investors from Silicon Valley and New York State as well as support from government agencies. Now if you're interested in this wonderful journey of helping millions of patients around the world please come to me and talk to me after this talk. Thank you very much.