Azrul Azlan Hamzah is a Professor of Micro-Nanoelectromechanical Systems (MEMS/NEMS) and currently the Director of Institute of Microengineering and Nanoelectronics (IMEN), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. He received his BSc. from the University of California at Berkeley, USA in manufacturing engineering in 2000 and PhD from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia in microelectromechanical systems in 2008.

His research interests are graphene synthesis and technology, bioMEMS, artificial kidney, biomedical devices, Lab-on-Chip, micro/nano energy, MEMS technology and MEMS packaging. He leads several projects funded by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation Malaysia (MOSTI) and Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia (MoHE) in development of MEMS and bioMEMS devices.

He is also led the HiCoE (MEMS for artificial kidney) project and involved in NanoMITE (vertically aligned graphene) project under the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia. He has published more than 200 international journals and technical papers. He was the auditor and current committee member for Malaysia Nanotechnology Association (MNA) and senior member of Electron Devices Society of IEEE Malaysia Section (SMIEEE).

Kidney failure and chronic kidney disease (CKD) is one of the most prominent healthcare burden in the world today, affecting over 2 million people worldwide. In Malaysia alone, there are approximately 50,000 end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients in 2023, requiring constant dialysis to survive. This places a tremendous pressure on our healthcare system, where most of the patients are treated in government hospitals, and almost RM2billion are spend annually for maintaining ESRD patients nationwide. Hence, a revolutionary solution is direly needed. IMEN, UKM is developing PeritoCare®, a portable peritoneal dialysis system, which enables patients to perform dialysis on the go. One of the main challenges in developing artificial kidney system is to overcome blood clotting problem. A novel approach is developed, in which blood components are separated before filtration. Dielectrophoresis (DEP) electrodes are embedded on silicon nanoporous membranes to separate cells from the plasma before filtration, thus simultaneously avoiding clogging and clotting to occur on the silicon nanoporous membranes. Red blood cells (RBCs) were deviated from the surface of membrane via DEP, to reduce clotting. The size of the nanopores were ranged between 50 nm and 80 nm. To determine the efficacy of the ultrafiltration process, particle size analysis (PSA) was utilised. The results indicated that particles larger than 80 nm were unable to pass through the nanoporous membranes, whereas smaller particles were free to pass through. The percentage of albumin, ADH and blood plasma that passed through the membranes were 65.80%, 92.60% and 71.40%, respectively, compared to 44.38%, 47.04% and 34.08% of those without embedded DEP electrodes. This showed that the performance of ultrafiltration membrane had increased by the implementation of DEP mechanism, which reduced RBCs coagulation.