PanTHERA Cryosolutions
Disruptive innovation is an innovation by a company of any size that is, or has the potential to, change the industry they are in. This often involves new technology or a new business model, and it disrupts the measures of values of the market segment. Today, I will introduce to you a start-up company called PanTHERA Cryosolutions.
I am very interested in Hematology and Life Sciences, so this company is something that hits close to home. PanTHERA is innovative because it could provide a solution to the challenge of storing blood for long periods of time. It is an extremely small company in Canada that designs and manufactures cryopreservation solutions for organs, tissues, and cells. So why do we need this?
When blood is donated, it can only be stored for about 42 days, which is why blood centers need a constant supply of blood, especially for rare blood type groups. After that, the blood is considered expired, because the level of nitric oxide in the blood would be too low to properly supply oxygen. This is where blood freezing comes in. We cannot directly freeze blood because as water freezes and thaws, it expands and ruptures the blood cells. The main goal of cryopreservation is to prevent the formation of ice crystals in blood. As of the current moment, methods of cryopreservation require large amounts of organic solvents, or cryoprotectants, which are then removed after thawing. Red blood cells use a glycerol solution as cryoprotectant, and stem cells use dimethyl sulfoxide. This method, while it works, is pretty ineffective as it requires a lot of material, time, and effort.
A while ago, I came across a few articles about antifreeze proteins in Antarctic fish, specifically a group of around 120 marine fish species, called the Notothenioids. The Notothenioids contain antifreeze proteins in their blood that recognise the surface of ice crystals and bind to them extremely tightly, effectively stopping the growth of the ice crystal.
This is where PanTHERA CryoSolutions comes in. Their goal is to develop products that would control ice crystal formation and protect the frozen material from freezing damage.
The PanTHERA scientists took inspiration from the antifreeze proteins of the Notothenioids and other animals such as frogs and insects to create their completely synthetic products. I personally find this very cool, because I believe that studying nature is beneficial, even in technology. The company has created 4 or 5 antifreeze Ice Crystallization Inhibitors so far that work really well to prevent ice crystals from growing. There are two types of antifreeze activities; Thermal Hysteresis, and Ice Crystallization Inhibition, and PanTHERA observed that they could engineer and shrink the molecules to only have one of those activities to mimic the antifreeze in the animals. I’m not going to pretend I understand all the chemistry behind it, but I’m hoping someday I will get to have a good understanding of Chemistry, even if I'm not planning on pursuing it as a career.
PanTHERA products would be vital not only in storing blood, but for supporting biomedical applications such as cell based therapeutics, tissue engineering, assisted reproduction and vaccine storage. However these products would not only be used in the medical field, there are many industrial applications, such as preventing ice from forming on airplane wings or in oil pipelines.
The rising demand of blood is only pushing the need for PanTHERA products. Their product could be revolutionary, not only in the medical field, but for the world too.
