Health Care Q&A: Synthetic blood startup’s new CEO hopes to bring product to hospitals, battlefields and eventually Mars
St. Louis Business Journal
By Brian Robbins
From paramedics to soldiers, a synthetic blood substitute could change the health care industry. At least that’s what KaloCyte’s new CEO Elaine Haynes believes.
Haynes, who was took the position in August, brings expertise to KaloCyte from her time as an executive at Mallinckrodt and as a nuclear pharmacist. She will help steer the startup to capture more grant funding and ultimately lead the product, ErythroMer, to market.
ErythroMer is a universal, freeze-dried blood substitute that can be reactivated with water and administered to treat traumatic hemorrhages when blood supplies are limited.
While not designed as a true replacement for the real thing, ErythroMer would act as a substitute until a patient could gain access to real blood.
According to Haynes, the startup has raised about $5 million in National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Department of Defense grants as well as $800,000 from investors.
Haynes talked with the Business Journal about where the company is headed and the impact a synthetic blood substitute could make in health care.
What made you interested in KaloCyte? I wanted to work with smart people but also in a great culture. I (previously) got to work in depth with the founders as well as several of the key team members and I got the (chance) to know the technology a little bit better. I also got to see how the team interacted on a day-to-day basis. We just clicked, it was a very easy transition. The business plan they had in place made sense and it was a very cool product to learn about. For something that is ultimately going to save lives and have such a huge impact on trauma victims, it was really attractive.
How does ErythroMer work? It’s a hemoglobin, which is in our red blood cells, along with some other chemistry to make it pick up oxygen where it’s supposed to and then drop it off. (ErythroMer) has benign physiology where it acts like a normal red blood cell but doesn’t cause any other additional damage. (Co-Founders, Dr. Dipanjan Pan, Dr. Alan Doctor, and Dr. Philip Spinella) found ways to make it work. Ultimately, there’s interest from NASA in taking this product to space stations and on the mission to Mars. Once it’s delivered, we envision that ErythroMer will be a freeze-dried powder that can be reconstituted with water or saline to restore it to a blood-like substance that can be administered in an ambulance, or in a battlefield, or in a remote setting where blood is needed but not available.
Including yourself, how many people work at KaloCyte? We have two full-time scientists on payroll. We have a product development lead, and our fabrication chemist. We have others that are working for us either on a contract basis or for equity, or part-time as part of their roles with different universities. Overall, it’s a team of less than 10 on an active, day-to-day basis and we expect to add a few more scientists over the next year.
What’s the future look like for ErythroMer? First, we have to focus on getting ErythroMer developed. As part of coming in, we developed our strategy, timeline and have an aggressive plan in place to compete for additional grant funding to make sure that we’re hitting reasonable timelines to get this product developed. We expect to be in our first human trials within just a couple of years. For a product that’s so complex, that’s aggressive. But we have so much support and interest from various arms of the Department of Defense, government and university-based researchers that we’ve got the top minds in the world helping. That’s incredibly rewarding and exciting to be a part of.