Oral sorbent therapy, as an adjunct or a replacement for dialysis therapy, is one area of research with great potential. If successful it can help kidney failure patients avoid a "life on the machine" existence. For the past twenty years the major problem was in finding an effective oral sorbent for urea. The use of oral microcapsules containing a urease-silica adduct and ion exchanger zirconium phosphate, though successful in reducing urea levels, resulted in a number of problems including a negative calcium balance. In this thesis it is demonstrated that the use of microcapsules containing a urease-zeolite preparation may be a potential route to urea removal. The use of zeolite ion exchangers, and zeolite W in particular, can alleviate the above mentioned problems of zirconium phosphate. In addition, the use of enzyme envelopes on zeolite support, which replaces silica, can reduce the amount of ingested material by at least 25%. The present "in vitro" study shows that the microcapsules remove up to 80% of urea in less than one hour. Preliminary "in vivo" experiments on Sprague-Dawley uraemic rats treated with ingested microcapsules indicate reductions in urea level and a lengthening of survival times compared to controls.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.74273 |
| Date | January 1989 |
| Creators | Cattaneo, Maurizio Vittorio |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Chemical Engineering.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001067438, proquestno: AAINN63452, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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