Innovating Medicine: The Journey Toward Artificial Blood

This episode of “The UMB Pulse” podcast features Allan Doctor, MD, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who was the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s (UMB) David J. Ramsay Entrepreneur of the Year in 2022. Doctor also is the co-founder and chief scientific officer at KaloCyte, a company focused on developing freeze-dried, powdered synthetic blood designed to save lives in emergency situations where traditional blood transfusions are not viable. 

Doctor outlines the imperative need for an easily transportable and universally usable blood substitute for scenarios such as accidents or battlefield injuries, where immediate blood replacement can make the difference between life and death. The podcast explores the science of blood, the challenges of creating a stable and biologically compatible blood substitute, and the potential applications beyond emergency medicine. The episode also delves into Doctor’s background, the support from UMB and various grants including substantial funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the future of artificial blood research at the University of Maryland BioPark.

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Transcript

Charles Schelle: 0:00

Dana, it's getting warmer outside. You, I feel like I'm switching over to colder drinks for my warmer drinks. And I got a little bit of orange on my mind because it's opening day today for the Baltimore Orioles. But you know, I, I really liked Tang when I was a kid, you know, just that powder, orange substance, and you just mix it in a little bit.

Dana Rampolla: 0:21

Tang, the drink of the astronauts, right? I think you're dating yourself too, Charles, I'm just going to

Charles Schelle: 0:26

say. Well, I probably had more of the powder form Hawaiian Punch, but I think more people recognize like Tang is, you know, so universal, right? You could bring it anywhere. You could bring it to a picnic, you can bring it on vacation, just, you know, anytime you need it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Water to mix

Dana Rampolla: 0:44

it

Charles Schelle: 0:44

with. Just that water, right? Now, imagine. something like Tang, not drinkable though, unless you're a vampire, but for use of blood. Huh?

Dana Rampolla: 0:55

That's an interesting concept,

Charles Schelle: 0:57

right? It is. And so we have somebody at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who's making a freeze dried powdered substance that you just add water to to create blood that could save countless number of lives for the people who are bleeding out because of a car accident or maybe they were shot on the battlefield serving in the military.

Dana Rampolla: 1:22

Yep. Yep. We have our one of our very own doctors with us today. He is the professor in the department of pediatrics. Dr. Alan doctor. We won't be able to forget that name. And I'm sure he's heard that joke before, so he is our 2022 David J. Ramsey Entrepreneur of the Year. He's the co founder and chief scientific officer at KaloCyte, which is working to develop, as you said, a dried bio inspired artificial red blood He's a professor in the Department of pediatrics here at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. He also is the director of the Center for Blood Oxygen Transport and Hemostasis at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. And that's a mouthful. It's a lot to say lots to remember.

Charles Schelle: 2:06

So he came to us from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and you'll hear more later in the episode about What made them come to UMB and the BioPark? And it's a really encouraging story to hear about how we support entrepreneurs who are both faculty researchers and, and the business world of biotech.

Dana Rampolla: 2:32

It's a whole combo of, of things we'll be talking about today. I'm going to run real quick, grab myself a glass of Tang, mix it up. Would you like me to grab one for you, Charles? And we'll get started. All right.

Jena Frick: 2:47

You're listening to the heartbeat of the University of Maryland Baltimore, the UMB Pulse.

Dana Rampolla: 3:00

Welcome, Dr. Doctor. We're so happy to have you here.

Allan Doctor: 3:04

Thanks. I appreciate the invitation.

Dana Rampolla: 3:07

Let's start out today, back in my former life. Some many, many, I won't say how many years ago I was a biology major. So I do remember a little bit. Blood is an interesting type of substance. It has very specific colors and components to it. Would you take a minute and just give us a blood 101 lesson?

Allan Doctor: 3:26

Sure. Blood is technically an organ like your liver and kidney. It executes lots of important functions in our body. The one that most of us are pretty interested in is moving oxygen from your lungs to the cells where it's consumed. So everybody probably knows that all of our cells have little furnaces where they burn glucose using oxygen and the oxygen has to get there through our bloodstream and blood goes through the lungs capturing the oxygen in a protein called hemoglobin that's carried in our red blood cells. That's what makes blood red, by the way, is the hemoglobin, and then it gets pumped by the heart and distributed through blood vessels so that it flows through all of our tissues, and it then captures carbon dioxide and other waste. And that travels around the body and the wastes are excreted in the kidney or processed in the liver and so on. Blood also carries a system for closing holes. So if you get cut and your blood starts to leak out, it stops on its own because you have a clotting system that plugs the hole. And that's another very important function of blood.

Dana Rampolla: 4:49

Perfect. So you've kind of laid the groundwork for us to understand what blood is and why we need it. So set the scene for us. Why are you studying about blood? What problem are you trying to solve related to blood? And how long have scientists been looking into this?

Allan Doctor: 5:10

So how long of scientists been looking into it is a complicated question, really, in the surprisingly, blood and its functions weren't really understood until, really the 1600s or 1700s when people finally realized that there was a circulatory system and that blood was, was part of it. That's a whole nother story though. What we study in my laboratory is the, how blood, Distribution is governed because we have a very efficient system for distributing blood flow with literally miles of routes that our blood can take in order to get to every single cell. And the important feature of our system is that it's scalable. So, like, You know, you might need to suddenly start running and back in the day during evolution, you would need to run to get food and you would need to run to get away from someone that wanted you as food. So, this was very important. And so you had to ramp up your engine or your oxygen consumption. And so blood is a big part of that. Now, blood is driven through the system through blood pressure, right? It's a pressurized system. That's what moves the blood up to your brain or through other solid organs, and the pressure's delivered by the heart. But like with all hydraulic systems, they require a volume, okay, to work, and if you start to lose that volume, like if you bleed or you get dehydrated, the pressure falls and the system can fail. The system can also fail. If you don't get enough red blood cells, so you start to get anemic. And so we study both of those things and how they can be corrected by creating artificial blood. And so we that's a large focus of the laboratory right now. And so in order to design synthetic blood, you have to understand how blood works. And that's, you know, also part of the program.

Charles Schelle: 7:29

You mentioned about,, bleeding and loss of blood. What problem you're trying to solve as far as that need of getting a blood supply to someone on site when they're bleeding out?

Allan Doctor: 7:43

So the simple thing is first to understand that when you're bleeding a couple of things happen that need to be addressed pretty promptly. So, as everybody knows, if your heart stops. You have to restart the heart within a specific amount of time, or you start to develop brain injury, or you get organ injury, or you die, and that's minutes. The same thing is true if you are suffocating. You don't get oxygen into the blood, okay? The same thing is true if your heart is, is beating, and you're getting oxygen into your lungs, okay? But you lose enough blood so that the pressure falls. In the system and that's the, they all have the same sort of time sensitivity because the bottom line is oxygen isn't getting to the brain and other tissues. Now, if you bleed in a hospital, and we can control the bleeding, so a hole opens up somewhere and you start to bleed. We can staunch the hole. Then we can replace the lost blood with stored blood, which is a transfusion. And that will fix the problem every time. So that's a problem we can solve very effectively, but you have to be in a hospital. The blood can't be delivered outside the hospital for transfusion because it's a living tissue and it has to be maintained through something called a cold chain. So it, it spoils very fast. And really, it's only allowed outside the refrigerators for about four hours. So it's just not practical to bring it out of the hospital. The problem is that people bleed at the scene of accidents or in their house, so somebody might develop an ulcer and bleed in their living room, or someone might be in an accident, like, let's say you were in the scene of an accident where a bridge collapsed you might you might have bleeding, or you might be wounded on a battlefield. And. If you can't get the blood, we can put salt water, okay, in the bloodstream. That's all we do now, is we give what are called saline infusions, and that can improve the blood pressure, but not if you lose more than, say, Half of your blood then it's just not enough and people will die. So right now, 20,000 people a year die before they can get to the hospital because we can't give them blood. They basically just bleed to death. This is quite a bit. That's just in the US not the world. What we're doing is trying to develop alternatives to natural blood that are shelf stable and could be delivered at the scene of an accident. So that would keep someone alive from the scene of an accident or from a medical emergency outside a hospital. So that you could get them into an emergency room and get natural blood.

Charles Schelle: 10:55

I don't know if you have the statistic on the spot, but as far as deaths due to loss of blood What's the main cause? Is it a car accident? Gunshots?

Allan Doctor: 11:06

It's, it's trauma. So it's, it's, I couldn't tell you, it depends on the region whether that's more likely. So for example, in the city of Baltimore, you know, the car accidents aren't going, they're usually not fast enough to really, you know, cause that kind of bleeding. You have to really be on the highway, but that's where you get stabbed and shot are in cities. Thanks. So, for example, in Manhattan, it's all, you know, penetrating trauma. However, if you're in a say, where people can get going fast enough, it's those are the dominant injury is, is a car accident.

Dana Rampolla: 11:45

You mentioned the saline when when someone gets that saline infusion, does, do they still need to have a blood transfusion when they get to a hospital or?

Allan Doctor: 11:55

Well, it depends on how much blood they lost. So we have an incredible amount of reserve in our system. So, for example you know, we can lose half of our red blood cells so that if you can restore the blood pressure, you don't need blood. So you're Literally, we can lose half. We have twice as much as we need, really almost three times as much as we need, if you have a normal heart, lung, and vascular tree. So there's lots of redundancy in the system, so you can compensate for loss of red cells by improved performance with the heart, the lungs, and the vascular tree. However, if you've got a weak heart Or you've got problems with your lungs like emphysema or you've got problems with your vascular tree like if you have diabetes or kidney failure, then you're less able to tolerate blood loss and maybe you can only lose 20 percent of your red blood cells, but a young healthy. Adolescent can lose two thirds of their red cells, and if we can stabilize their blood pressure with a salt saline infusion, then we don't have to give them blood when they get to the hospital. But most of the people bleeding are not healthy 15 year olds, unfortunately.

Charles Schelle: 13:16

Right. So, you went into this a little bit, but, but paint a picture, what does artificial blood look like from the start, and, and how does it work to mimic real blood?

Allan Doctor: 13:29

Well, well, you have to split it into two components. There's the principal task of executing the function of red blood cells, which is to move oxygen. Okay. And then there's the task of helping blood clot. Okay. Which is what the plasma and the platelets do in our blood. So if you need a transfusion by definition, you are probably bleeding. If you are bleeding and that continues, then you can't ever stop the problem. So, obviously, if there's a leak in a hydraulic system, you need to replace the fluid, but you also have to stop the leak. Or, you can't, you can't stabilize the system. So we have to, when we're replacing blood, we have to pay attention to both things. Now, there are different thresholds for replacing these two things. And so you can get away with first replacing the oxygen carrying capacity. If, for example, you can use a tourniquet to stop bleeding in an extremity. But if you have internal bleeding from an ulcer or a fractured liver or kidney or something like that, or bleeding into the chest where you can't, you know, just, it can't be controlled easily before you get to the hospital. Then we also have to give components that help stop the bleeding, which would be synthetic or artificial platelets and plasma, the oxygen carrier. Okay. People have been working on this for almost 80 years. And the principal problem is red blood cells can't be stored at room temperature. So What people tried was to purify the key element from red cells, hemoglobin, and to just put that in the bloodstream, hoping it would work. Now, there's a reason that humans evolved, and mammals, and basically all animals, more complicated than a worm, evolved with the hemoglobin encapsulated in a membrane. It's not free in plasma. There's a reason for that, in that it causes injury to blood vessels if it's free. And people weren't, didn't learn this until we tried, you know, putting Hemoglobin free into the bloodstream and people found some problems that they tried to address with modifying it chemically and creating complex polymers and it looked like it might work and they got very far with this program, even to human trials. But those human trials ended up resulting in making the recipients even sicker than they were if they didn't get blood. And so people were dying from heart attacks and strokes who had gotten the artificial blood. And the FDA closed this program down in around 2006, 2008. And the next generation Okay, of auction carriers all sheath the hemoglobin inside a membrane inside a cell and that's a more complicated problem. And that's the one that we have worked on, is that we have designed an artificial red blood cell where we have a membrane that imitates the behavior of the membrane that encloses hemoglobin in a red blood cell, and we strip down the contents to only include the elements that carry oxygen. And so we've done that, and we can now freeze dry it, so it's a dry powder, like instant coffee, okay, which is freeze dried, and just like instant coffee, you reconstitute it by adding water. And you can drink the coffee right away after you add the water, and you can transfuse the blood right away after you add the water. So, the way it works is that a medic would carry around the red powder, which is freeze dried artificial red blood cells, and you add water, and within a few minutes, it's fully reconstituted and can be administered. To to normalize oxygen carrying capacity in blood. Now, that doesn't help with blood clotting. That's another subject.

Charles Schelle: 18:11

That's amazing. I mean, that's, that's absolutely a game changer with how nimble of a product. It could be, as you said, freeze dried, which means you can pretty much bring it anywhere. As, as you said, on a battlefield, potentially have water on hand and, and save countless lives.

Dana Rampolla: 18:29

How how are you actually testing it then?

Allan Doctor: 18:34

We've been working on this for almost 10 years. So that's quite a bit of time. So the initial challenge, of course, was to design the shell so that it is compatible with our body. So biocompatible, right? So you can mix it into the human bloodstream. And so we use. You know, molecules they're actually fat molecules. Our cell membranes are made up of fat in case people didn't know that. And there are five different molecules that we use and they all have a surface and properties that are very similar to the ones that are in our cells and just the right blend. And believe it or not, we even have to add a little cholesterol. Into the membrane to make it like a normal membrane, and it will form like a, a little bubble, like a balloon, and the balloon is stuffed with the hemoglobin protein that we normally have in our red blood cells. Only these are much smaller, they're about a fiftieth the size of a red blood cell. Now, the first thing was to make sure it would capture and release oxygen, which we were able to demonstrate. And that it does it just like a red blood cell. And the next thing was to demonstrate that it won't break open when it's flying around the bloodstream. So we had to work on it to make it stable for what we call the shearing stress of going through circulation. And the next was to make sure that it didn't make the blood too thick or thin. That's the viscosity of the blood. And then we had to make sure that it wouldn't interfere with the way blood vessels work. The blood vessels have to stay open, Just the right amount so that they create enough resistance to create a blood pressure, but not so small that they don't let blood through. And this was a huge problem with the, the quote, naked hemoglobin that would just go straight into the bloodstream because it interfered with the regulation of blood flow. blood vessel caliber so that we get they would get very small. They would go into spasm. Kind of like you get a cramp, you know, in your arm or leg. And the muscles sort of clinches up and what was happening is the, our blood vessels have muscles and they would clinch up as if they had a cramp and then no blood can go through. And this was being caused by the free hemoglobin. So we had to make sure our cells don't do that. And finally, we make sure that they don't activate our immune system, because our immune system is designed so that it, it's constantly interrogating anything it encounters, is this part of, of your body or not? And if it's not, it goes after it with a vengeance, like it goes after a virus or a bacteria or a fungus. or foreign tissue. So, it will go after foreign material and that has to be what we call immune silent. And so that was all the bench testing, okay, before we even got into animals. And then we started with mice and rats and now we're into rabbits and we've been working in for a few years. And our next step is to move into primates. So, and then humans and we're, what we think is about two years away from our first trial in, in humans. That's

Charles Schelle: 22:19

amazing. That's

Dana Rampolla: 22:21

incredible. I didn't even think about the immunity part that people, people's cells would reject it or could reject it.

Allan Doctor: 22:28

Yes, so the, the important thing to recognize is that because it's immune silent, there's no blood typing. So we can give it to anybody regardless of blood type. And in fact, it's so immune silent, we can give it to any species. So we can give the same red cells to a dog a whale you know, a mouse, a zebra whatever. So there's a veterinary application for the same product.

Dana Rampolla: 22:56

Wow, that's incredible.

Charles Schelle: 22:58

You know, I was wondering too, red blood cells naturally have their own lifespan. What's the lifespan of, or does it even matter, of an artificial blood cell?

Allan Doctor: 23:07

Oh no, it matters. So you want it, you want it to circulate for just the right amount of time. That's right. So red cells, by the way, circulate for about 120 days after they're born in your bone marrow. It's amazing how, how, how we are constantly replacing our blood. You turn over about 1 percent of your red blood cells a day. And in the course, which is, you know, billions of red blood cells, we have about three or four trillion red cells, right? Circulating right now. It's the most abundant cell in your body by it's about 80 percent of your cells are red blood cells. And you make like, I think it's four or five kilograms of red blood cells in the course of your lifetime. So it's a very important cell. So. Ours the artificial red cells circulate. So about, we speak in terms of half lives. So that means when about half of them disappear. So the half life is depending on, on circumstances, anywhere from 12 to 16, sorry, 10 to 16 hours. So it's suitable for bridging therapy from an accident to an emergency department. And then. And then after you get to the emergency department, if you still need blood, you would then get natural blood so that they don't last quite as long or anywhere near as long as a natural blood cell does.

Dana Rampolla: 24:45

That's so interesting. When, when you think about people with, whether they have well this might sound like a silly question, but what if I have like some sort of artificial organs? Is the blood as effective like is there anything different if I have something, some sort of a transplant?

Allan Doctor: 25:00

No. In fact, there's an application for transplanting that we haven't discussed. The primary application that we are working on right now is to resuscitate people who are bleeding outside of hospitals. Okay, but there are other issues. For example, when we do a transplant you take the organ out of the donor and you put it into the recipient and usually the, unless it's a living transplant where you're, you've got a living donor giving a kidney and it's going to you know, the recipient might be in the next room. Usually, you harvest the organ in a certain situate place and time, and you transplant it in a different place at a much later time. And the organ has to be preserved as you go from the donor to the recipient. And there's a limited amount of time that you can have an organ out of the body. So the time that you can have an organ out of the body can be extended if you could create an artificial circulation for that organ. And natural blood does not work that well in this situation, and so the blood substitute can extend that time. The duration between organ harvest and transplant and even resuscitate organs that might not be working so well. So if somebody is donating organs, often they're, they're not just they're not healthy. So they sometimes those organs are impaired and you can get them out. and resuscitate the organ, then you can salvage organs that would not otherwise be transplantable. So there's a transplant application for the synthetic blood. Also, when you go on cardiopulmonary bypass in the hospital for heart surgery or lung surgery, sometimes you, you have an artificial circulation and that requires blood. Now, especially for babies. Now we envision the possibility that you could. When you put someone on bypass, take their own blood and take it out of the system and store it, do the operation under artificial blood, and then remove that and put the natural blood back. And that would prevent somebody from getting exposed to transfusion, because transfusions during bypass operations create injury. Additionally, you've heard of interventional. Radiology where they do angioplasties and open blocked arteries. So to open a blocked artery, you put a balloon in a catheter and blow up the balloon and you relieve a stricture or you break open a clot. And you do that in the brain and the heart and the kidney, other really vital organs. So your ability to do that is limited by how long you can hold the balloon up. Okay, because no blood goes past the balloon when it's open. If instead you can give artificial blood through a catheter tip that goes beyond the balloon, then you can extend the time that you can keep the balloon up and make those operations, those procedures safer. So there's lots of other applications for this, even in space. So, to go to Mars there's no blood bank on possibility there, or, and the current, believe it or not, the current plan for space travel, if there's an accident where there's bleeding, is to hold pressure. That's it. So there's no possibility of bringing a blood bank with you because of the weight constraints. And the only other option would be to have astronauts that have compatible blood types, so that if someone needed a transfusion, you could take blood from them. from astronaut one and give it to astronaut two. Now, obviously that's not ideal. So NASA is actually interested in freeze dried blood because it's light. So there are all kinds of applications that are in unusual circumstances for if we could successfully create freeze dried blood.

Charles Schelle: 29:37

You, you brought up a good point. The interest in it, just the concept of substitute blood just tips the scales and opens up all sorts of possibilities. So with that, obviously you have the attention of the federal government. So, tell us a little bit about some of the funding and research commitments that you've received recently.

Allan Doctor: 29:56

So our initial seed funding came from the NIH and the Department of Defense. We designed this technology and created a company called KaloCyte which means beautiful cell in Greek to to develop the artificial red blood cell. And we received about$5 million in support from the NIH and Department of Defense. To do the initial proof of concept work, we've received about another 10 to$15 million in in grants from the NIH and federal Government, and about$5 million in private uh, equity funding um, for the company. The research program has recently secured a very large grant from DARPA, which is the Defense Advanced Research Administration. DARPA doesn't just do biological research, you know, they famously created the internet, Develop stealth technology and other wild things. So they do high risk, high gain projects, and the Department of Defense wanted to create a synthetic blood program. So that would be both the blood clotting and auction transport functions. And we competed with about 10 other teams for that award, which is almost 50 million to design and generate. synthetic blood that can be freeze dried.

Charles Schelle: 31:35

And you have an entire consortium working on this, too, right there. There's like a what is it a 15 site consortium across the country?

Allan Doctor: 31:41

Yes, there's multiple sites, including several, um, large universities as University of Pittsburgh, University of California, San Diego Case Western Reserve University Penn State University. Are all and Ohio State University are all participating and then several small companies that are generating the components. KaloCyte is generating the oxygen carrier. There's a small company called hemotherapeutics that is developing the synthetic platelet. And there's a larger company Teleflex that is generating the freeze dried plasma. And then a a research Institute. Called Southwest Research Institute that is helping with production scaling and bio manufacturing.

Dana Rampolla: 32:31

It's incredible. So you are actually here at UMB, University of Maryland, Baltimore, working on this. Tell us, has UMB been a support for this type of faculty entrepreneurship?

Allan Doctor: 32:44

Yes, well, it's why I moved here. So I, I was at Washington University in St. Louis and that's where we originally invented this technology and started KaloCyte in St. Louis. And I also led the. You know, the critical care group at St. Louis Children's Hospital and ran the division of pediatric critical care at Wash U School of Medicine. We were, um, working with the biopark there which was an incubator for small companies. It was institutionally a little challenging to create an effective and seamless partnership. I think that uh, faculty entrepreneurship is an evolving area in higher education and institutions with a major research focus, and some have become more agile than others. As our program was growing, we were looking for an ideal environment that would really foster the opportunities for synergy between my academic lab and the, the companies that were spinning out of the lab. And so, University of Maryland you know, we looked all over the country and uh, was exceptional in what they were, the environment the proximity to NIH and Department of Defense to the Shock Trauma Center, and the BioPark here, and the university and leadership at UMB was uh, very flexible and in allowing us to embed small companies in a new research center in university space, which was a very innovative and frankly new for UMB. It is the reason we were able to compete effectively for this DARPA award. No one else had the same opportunity to offer the government such synergy between the small companies and the unique capabilities that are really only available at research institutions.

Charles Schelle: 34:52

It's great to hear. And we're glad that you chose us to relocate your company and your research here. Yeah, as you mentioned, University of Maryland Biopark is an amazing area on our western edge of our campus. There are so many biotech companies there. It's a great thriving environment and it's growing. We have the 4MLK building going up, hopefully completed soon. We'll have space for even more companies, more like yourself.

Allan Doctor: 35:20

You know, and, and it's not just the, the, the fact that we came here, the, you know, the Office of Technology Transfer has, you know, provided incredibly robust support for new intellectual property generation. We've created many new patents since we've come here. They you know, have a lot of business expertise. They've supported. Our company executive leadership in fundraising with the local community and Maryland itself has a very favorable environment for investing in biotech. So, it's not just the, the science it's also been the the. I guess the service infrastructure that's also been very crucial and given us a, frankly, a competitive edge that is unmatched.

Dana Rampolla: 36:12

Tell us a little bit more about the center, obviously it sounds like things are going great in this area, but how does it fit in with everything else that you're doing and like how, how has it grown in size since you've been here significantly?

Allan Doctor: 36:26

Yeah, so the the research center is so it's called the Center for Blood Oxygen Transport and Hemostasis, which is blood clotting. So it's pretty obvious what we work on basically the you know, the, if it, it has to do with blood and you know, moving oxygen and the clotting functions of blood, And we work on that. We also study ways to optimize conventional blood storage. You know, that's basically 1950s technology that hasn't been meaningfully improved since that time. And there's a lot of room for improvement there. So we have a number of projects in that area. We've recruited two key faculty members to join me here at the center. They each lead large research programs. Each of those labs has about 10 to 16 people in them. And so they are traditional labs with graduate students and postdoctoral fellows that study you know. topics related to blood function. I also have an academic lab about that size and we study acquired injury to red blood cells. For example, how diabetes or kidney failure or infections can alter red blood cell function and how to mitigate that. We also study sickle cell disease and We're developing therapeutics for for sickle cell. So, you know, the growth has been quite rapid. Our you know, one measure of us of progress is the funding, which has improved almost about 700 percent in extramural support since we've come here. And that's excluding the big DARPA grant, which is kind of an outsized you know, addition.

Charles Schelle: 38:16

The Dean's a little bit of the same ilk of that entrepreneurial spirit and, and supporting this with the faculty entrepreneurship. What have you've kind of observed and what can you tell us about what Dean Gladwin kind of brings to this?

Allan Doctor: 38:30

Well, sure, I should 1st mention that, you know, it was, you know, Dean Reese that that brought me here. And through an initiative, he called the STRAP program where he basically invested sufficient resources to give a space and to recruit an entire team. And so he really was the seed. And Dean Gladwin, as you know, has succeeded Dean Reese. I've known Dean Gladwin for almost 20 years. And we work in a very similar scientific domain. And he Also is is an entrepreneur, has started a company called Globin Therapeutics. He's very supportive of our work and faculty entrepreneurship in general. We have an evolving collaboration, in fact. And I couldn't be happier with his leadership. He's been incredibly supportive both he and Dr. O'Donnell who's the vice dean for research have been very supportive of the center and I expect that others like me will find this an ideal place to come and do their science.

Charles Schelle: 39:41

Fantastic. Well, we've really kind of touched on the very tip of artificial blood in our short time here, and hopefully your research continues with great success, and, can't wait to have it hit the market and save plenty of lives,

Allan Doctor: 40:00

Well, thank you for the interest and the opportunity to discuss it. If anybody in the university community would like to learn more or interact in a collaborative fashion My name's pretty easy to remember. And so I'd be delighted to to address any inquiries from the community.

Charles Schelle: 40:21

And we'll make sure we'll put those in our show notes too. So all of our listeners just check the description and you'll find out how to reach out to Dr. Allan Doctor. So, Doctor, thank you for joining us on the UMB Pulse.

Allan Doctor: 40:34

Thank you for the opportunity.

Jena Frick: 40:41

The UMB Pulse with Charles Chalet and Dana Rampolla is a UMB Office of Communications and Public Affairs production, edited by Charles Chalet, marketing by Dana Rampolla.