A Medical Device Daily

New Health Sciences (NHSi; Bethesda, Maryland) has won a two-year award of $1.9 million from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH; Bethesda) to develop a groundbreaking blood-storage system.

The project aims to develop the Hemanext Anaerobic Storage Platform, 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 Small Business Innovation Research Phase II grant from NIH, which was reported on March 27, 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.

"Our technology aims to address this problem and in doing so, reduce the human and economic costs associated with extended hospitalization," Cannon said.

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.

NHSi expects widespread adoption of its Hemanext Anaerobic Storage Platform 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.

NHSi Director of R&D Tatsuro Yoshida said the new NIH grant "will enable us to move this laboratory technology to everyday use at blood banks by developing an inexpensive, self-contained storage system easily accommodated under current blood-bank operations."