Renal Monitoring to reduce occurrence of preoperative AKI

Student: Sam Gray, 2019-2020

The kidney is an essential, and fragile, piece of anatomical infrastructure. Acute Kidney injuries (AKI) while in hospital are a cause of increased morbidity, mortality, hospital length of stay, and financial burden on the healthcare system of already vulnerable patients. In cardiac surgery especially, up to 30% of procedures are associated with a perioperative AKI. There is a paucity of real-time monitoring techniques available to observe renal status and thereby prevent these perioperative AKIs. Medtronic is the largest medical devices company in the world and their Respiratory and Gastrointestinal group aim to develop the technologies that will be needed to correct this situation. These technologies will need to provide real-time monitoring of renal status, as opposed to renal function, a proxy indicator currently monitored in hospital. In working with Medtronic I will be conducting a Technical analysis of the different nascent technologies in development, and making the investment case for each before eventually putting together a development plan and launch strategy for the technology that the team decide to run with. I am immensely excited.