New federal agency kickstarts Indiana kidney project with $44M award
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Sen. Todd Young wants Indiana business leaders and researchers to pursue more national funds to help them make important health breakthroughs.
Young on Monday visited the 16 Tech innovation district to underscore the work of a young federal agency that wants to shake up the conventional model of funding biomedical research, which some say is too slow, by funding higher-profile projects.
The agency, Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (or ARPA-H, for short), was set up in 2022 to speed up innovative health projects.
Last month, the agency announced a $44 million contract over five years to 34 Lives, a West Lafayette company that seeks to transform donor kidneys available for life-saving transplantations.
Young said it’s the kind of promising innovation that deserves federal support. A former Marine, Young said he witnessed the toll of a suboptimal organ transplant process, when one of his friends, Gunnery Sergeant David McFarland, died waiting for a heart transplant.
“I resolved, after that experience, to do whatever I could at the federal level to ensure that that doesn’t happen to more Americans,” Young said “But so many of our doers and dreamers are really out there and making meaningful progress on this challenge. The work that 34 Lives does has the potential to save countless others from the fate that Gunny McFarland and his family experienced.”
The two-year old company’s project, called No Kidney Left Behind, aims to recover 50% of kidneys with viability concerns and to bolster transplant availability.
The company’s name is a reference to the 34 people each day who are removed from the transplant waiting list because they get too sick or die.
Every year, roughly 8,000 donor kidneys cannot be successfully transplanted due to concerns about viability in a patient recipient. The West Lafayette company is developing a comprehensive process to restore donated kidney viability, using a combination of cold and warm technologies to preserve the organs.
Related story: Indiana startup rescuing donated kidneys
Normally, a kidney can survive outside of the body for only about 24 hours. The company says its technology can extend that time by many hours, depending on the condition of the kidney. The company can handle up to 2,000 kidneys a year.
The company’s first transplant was done April 20 by Indiana University Health transplant surgeon Dr. Bill Goggins. Since then the company has performed 31 human kidney rescues with 25 kidneys transplanted.
“And so we are driven not by the numbers, but by the patients. Our mission is patient-focused,” said Kathleen St. Jean, co-founder of 34 Lives.
Also appearing at Monday’s press conference was the fifth patient to receive a kidney through 34 Lives, Sylvia Miles, 47, of Indianapolis. She was diagnosed with lupus in 2006, and later with Stage 1 cancer. In 2020, she was diagnosed with Stage 5 kidney disease, requiring her to undergo frequent dialysis sessions.
Miles had been on the transplant waiting list for five years. In May, got a call from Dr. Goggins.
“He called me, and he was like, ‘Hey, I got a kidney for you.’” Miles recalled. “And I was like, wow, really?”
The next day, his coordinator called back to confirm the kidney. Miles responded: “Wow, are you serious? I mean, I was just full of joy, plenty of tears. You know, it’s a long way coming, because I had been put on a list, taken off the list, put on the list, taken off the list.”
In the past two years, ARPA-H has launched about 20 programs, everything from whole eye transplantation to programs that address cyber challenges, said Dr. Renee Wegrzyn, director of ARPA-H.
“We know we don’t have the monopoly on good ideas, and so we also have open solicitations where we get ideas from outside ARPA-H that really embody the types of opportunities that we have as a nation, and as a funder to be able to advance those better health outcomes for everyone,” she said. “In those two years since we’ve launched, we’ve spent now about $2.3 billion in investment across the United States and the globe to really address these big challenges.”
ARPA-H said if the No Kidney Left Behind program is successful, the resulting biomarker assessments, artificial prediction tools and warm perfusion technology might be able to be extended to other transplantable organs.
Indiana is home to nearly 2,500 life-science companies, 63,000 employees and more than $12 billion in exported products, from pharmaceutical drugs to surgical stents.
Young encouraged other companies to apply for funding and to help make Indiana a center of medical innovation.
“I know the research ARPA-H is funding has the potential to help even more Hoosier entrepreneurs get their lifesaving ventures off the ground,” he said. “I hope today is just the start of a long and fruitful relationship between the Indiana life sciences industry and our funding partners at ARPA-H.”