Reported December 2009
SAN DIEGO (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Sickle cell -- it's a genetic disease that affects 70,000 people in the U.S. A blood disease that causes extreme pain, there is no cure. Now researchers are working toward a life-saving solution.
"I've had my spleen, gallbladder, tonsils and adenoids removed," 15-year-old sickle cell sufferer Albert Pinckney told Ivanhoe.
Mothers and sons … sisters and brothers … all know the reality of living with sickle cell disease.
"You have to get transfusion every month so the cells don't clump up," Pinckney explained.
Healthy red blood cells carry oxygen to all parts of the body. In sickle cell disease, red blood cells become deformed, clogging blood vessels and preventing oxygen from getting to tissues and organs.
"If you don't get oxygen to organs, that organ can fail, and that can ultimately lead to death," Brian O'Callaghan, president and CEO of Sangart in San Diego, Calif., told Ivanhoe.
O'callaghan leads the team at Sangart, creating a new way to deliver oxygen through the body. MP4 is made from hemoglobin in red blood cells. Hemoglobin delivers oxygen throughout the body. MP4 changes the shape of the red blood cells to maximize and target oxygen to starved tissue.
"This product has the ability to un-sickle," O'Callaghan explained. "This is where the blood cells sickle or contort, causing pain, and our product can un-sickle these cells."
MP4 can make it's way through blocked arteries, and since it's not blood, it can be created with expired, unused blood.
"Now the hemoglobin is perfectly good, but the blood expires, so we recycle it," Kim Vandegriff, Ph.D., a biochemist at Sangart, explained. "We purify the hemoglobin out of the blood we get rid of all the pathogens. We sterilize it, and then we modify it."
Right now, clinical trials are underway in Europe … and MP4 could be tested in the U.S. soon. The hope -- to prevent sickle cell crisis.
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