McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine
faculty member William Federspiel, PhD, William Kepler Whiteford Professor of Chemical Engineering, Surgery and Bioengineering, University of Pittsburgh, and Director of the McGowan Institute’s Medical Devices Laboratory, is a partner in a $1.9 million award from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a groundbreaking blood-storage system. The project aims to advance New Health Sciences Inc.’s (NHSi) Hemanext Anaerobic Storage Platform (illustrated), which delivers higher quality blood for transfusion therapy and extends the shelf life of blood for transfusion. NHSi has demonstrated that this new technology can deliver higher-quality, more physiologic blood, with an improved capacity to deliver oxygen and more deformable red blood cells for better capillary perfusion, and extend by 50 percent or more the shelf life of stored red blood cells.
The 2-year Small Business Innovation Research Phase II grant from NIH follows a 2007-2008 Phase I grant of $133,290. “This grant is a major step forward for transfusion medicine,” NHSi President Martin Cannon said. “Evidence is mounting that, following transfusions, patients experience a multitude of complications resulting in increased morbidity and longer hospital stays that might have been prevented had better stored, better transported, and better preserved blood been used.”
Research has documented that the rate of complications increases with the number of units of blood transfused. Moreover, in a relatively large study, significantly worse post-operative outcomes were associated with blood stored longer than 15 days. The project partners expect widespread adoption of its new technology which will reduce the adverse side effects of life-saving blood transfusions and streamline blood-bank operations—alleviating periodic blood shortages and increasing pre-operative autologous (self-donated) blood donations.
“This research represents a paradigm shift in the approach to storage of red cells, the most significant change since the introduction of additive solutions 25 years ago,” Professor James AuBuchon of the University of Washington and President and CEO of Puget Sound Blood Center, said.
Other partners in this effort to develop this new technology include Filtertek Inc. of Hebron, Illinois, and Multisorb Technologies of Buffalo, New York.
Illustration: New Health Sciences Inc.
Read more…
New Health Sciences Inc. Press Release (05/26/09)
New Health Sciences Inc. Hemanext Anaerobic Storage Platform (larger technology image here)
Triangle Business Journal (05/26/09)
Virtualization (05/26/09)
McGowan Institute Medical Devices Laboratory
Bio: Dr. William Federspiel