People who suffer from chronic kidney failure—a group expected to number 300,000 in the US by the year 2000—face a lifetime of regular dialysis treatments. Eighty-five percent of these patients routinely receive hemodialysis, a procedure in which blood is removed from the body, usually via needles inserted into an access point in the forearm, filtered by a dialyzer, and returned to the body. Unfortunately, in the 30 years since dialysis has become an accepted treatment, no one has yet developed a long-term, satisfactory way to access the vascular system. When one factors in patient morbidity and the need to surgically remove and replace current methods of vascular access, the cost to the US health care system of vascular access alone is almost $2 billion.
Current methods of accessing the blood supply for dialysis include the surgical creation of an arteriovenous fistula (AV), that is,...