Willem Kolff, of the Netherlands, was able to secure a success in Kampen in 1945 that remained elusive to Haas. Kolff used a rotating drum kidney to treat a 67-year-old patient that had been admitted to the hospital with acute kidney failure. The week-long treatment with the device, which Kolff had developed in the years before, allowed the patient to later be released with normal kidney function. She died at the age of 73 from an illness unrelated to the kidney failure. Kolff had unsuccessfully treated 16 previous patients in a series of experiments, but this success became the first major breakthrough in the treatment of patients with kidney disease and proved the usefulness of the concepts developed by Abel and Haas.



Willem Kolff..............................Kolff rotating drum kidney (1943)


The success was partially due to the technical improvements in the actual equipment used for the treatment. Kolff’s rotating drum kidney used membranous tubes made from a new material known as cellophane that was actually used in the packaging of food. During the treatment, the blood-filled tubes were wrapped around a wooden drum that rotated through an electrolyte solution known as “dialysate”. As the membranous tubes passed through the bath, the uremic toxins would pass into this rinsing-liquid using the abovementioned physical principles.