Summary: I’m a cryobiologist working for a small startup in the UK. I’ve developed a cryoprotectant formulation that allows frozen packed red blood cell units to be prepared much faster than they currently can, which could save lives in the case of natural disasters and emergency situations in remote locations. It’s also a step toward improved blood banking systems which have the potential to save many more lives. I’m hoping to find funding or hear from anyone who could help with this.
(Note: For brevity, I will henceforth refer to packed red blood cell units as “blood”, although these units don't have the plasma, platelets and white blood cells that make up whole blood. Red blood cell transfusions are commonly used in emergency casualty care and have all the oxygen carrying capacity of whole blood.)
Imagine that your city has been hit by an earthquake, some rubble fell on you and now you’re losing blood from an internal haemorrhage. You need blood, but the city’s blood bank has been depleted by the sudden unexpected surge in demand. In these cases, a hospital might have a frozen supply as backup. But blood frozen with traditional methods (20-40% glycerol) takes over an hour to prepare (72-95 minutes). Most of this preparation time is spent slowly washing the glycerol out of the cells because red blood cells burst if the glycerol is removed too fast. You could die in the time it takes to prepare the blood for transfusion.
I’ve developed a cryoprotectant formulation that can be washed out much faster, cutting the total preparation time down to 43 minutes. With further research, I expect that we could reduce this to 30 minutes or less, perhaps as little as 15 minutes. This is possible because I have replaced glycerol with a formulation based on DMSO and an advanced novel cryoprotective polymer, which are much faster to wash out from the blood.[1][2]
Fresh (non-frozen) human blood units can only be stored for a maximum of 30-42 days before they must be discarded, depending on local regulations.[3] 35,931 units of blood are wasted each year in the UK alone, with 68% of the wastage being caused by expiry.[4] But the more important issue here is blood shortages, which disproportionately affect low-income countries.[5] It’s hard to get an estimate for global deaths due to blood shortages, but in India 12,000 people per day due to a lack of blood.[6] That’s 4,380,000 deaths per year, which is around 7x higher than the number of global deaths caused by malaria.
Developing a rapidly accessible frozen blood supply will help reduce both waste and shortages, and if we can transition to a system where blood is primarily stored frozen rather than stored in liquid form, we could develop a large frozen blood stockpile and both of these issues would mostly disappear.
We are in search of funding to develop and promote the adoption of this technology. We currently have a runway of approximately £200,000 (USD $257,475) so even small contributions will have a large impact on the success of this endeavour. We want to use this funding to hire an additional scientist (right now it’s just me working on our blood program) and buy the equipment to produce and test units of packed RBCs to regulatory specifications.
Our website: https://www.cryologyx.com/cryoshield-red
Contact: [email protected]
Red Blood Cell Cryopreservation with Minimal Post-Thaw Lysis Enabled by a Synergistic Combination of a Cryoprotecting Polyampholyte with DMSO/Trehalose https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.biomac.1c00599
Synthetically Scalable Poly(ampholyte) Which Dramatically Enhances Cellular Cryopreservation https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.biomac.9b00681
Lee, J. S.; Kim-Shapiro, D. B. Stored Blood: How Old Is Too Old? Journal of Clinical Investigation 2017, 127 (1), 100–102. DOI: 10.1172/JCI91309
