The ultimate goal of the program is to develop a safe, reliable electrochemical hypochlorite generator specifically for use in the cleaning and disinfecting of reused dialyzers. Hypochlorites have been widely used by health care facilities for the cleaning of reused dialyzers prior to sterilization with formaldehyde. An electrochemical generator system that produces sodium hypochlorite from salt (NaCl) solution on demand at set concentrations would increase safety, reproducibility and reliability of the reused dialyzer cleaning process. The quantity of generated hypochlorite would be accurately controlled by the electric current of the generator. In Phase I of this program, we successfully demonstrated that a unique electrochemical reactor that could generate hypochlorite on demand from NaCl without the generation of hydrogen. Furthermore, this electrochemically generated sodium hypochlorite, when flushed through a contaminated dialyzer, was shown to effectively restore clearance of urea and creatinine. For the Phase II of this program, we propose to further improve this unique electrochemical hypochlorite generator to precisely control hypochlorite concentration and pH, and integrate it with a commercial reuse machine. Using this automated setup, we propose to characterize the transport properties of high flux dialyzers under conditions of reuse.
