William Fissell, IV, MD
Medical Director, The Kidney Project
Associate Professor of Medicine
Division of Nephrology and Hypertension
Department of Medicine
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
William Fissell, MD, is Medical Director of The Kidney Project, a multidisciplinary, multicenter effort to engineer a universal door kidney to solve the scarcity problem in organ transplant.
He is a member of the American Society of Nephrology (ASN) and is past president of the American Society of Artificial Internal Organs (ASAIO). He serves on the ASN's Policy and Advocacy Committee and has been a peer reviewer for the NIH and several medical journals. His clinical interests include critical care nephrology and dialysis.
Dr. Fissell graduated from MIT with degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering. While he was an undergraduate and before medical school, he developed a love for patients while working as a 911 advanced life support paramedic in the under-resourced suburbs north of Boston. He completed an accelerated "3+3" medical school and internal medicine residency program at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland before subspecialty training in kidney disease at University of Michigan. There, he studied with H. David Humes, the pioneer of bioartificial kidney research.
Dr. Fissell's research group has focused on technology development to treat kidney failure. His team developed a completely novel biomimetic membrane for blood filtration that functions just like a kidney's filters, inside the body powered by the heart alone: no electric motors, no batteries. Along with that, his team has focused on understanding the mechanisms by with the physical microenvironment around a cell governs the activity of the cell. The two innovations together make up the Universal Donor Kidney for treatment of kidney failure.
Shuvo Roy, PhD
Technical Director, The Kidney Project
Professor of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences
School of Pharmacy
University of California, San Francisco
The Kidney Project is co-led by Shuvo Roy, PhD, bioengineer and professor at the University of California, San Francisco, whose research is dedicated to the development of biomedical devices to address unmet clinical needs.
His research is underway at UCSF where he is a professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences (BTS), a joint department of the UCSF Schools of Pharmacy and Medicine, and director of the UCSF Biomedical Microdevices Laboratory.
Dr. Roy is a founding member of the UCSF Pediatric Device Consortium, which has a mission to accelerate the development of innovative devices for children’s health, and a faculty affiliate of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3). Additionally, he is the Faculty Director of the Joint UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley Master of Translational Medicine (MTM) graduate program. He speaks nationally and internationally to academic and industry audiences about his research. He is the author of more than 120 publications and co-author of five book chapters and holds multiple patents for device developments.
Before joining the BTS department in 2008, Dr. Roy co-directed the BioMEMS Laboratory in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Cleveland Clinic.