PhenoTech: Delivering a More Accurate Blood-Typing Technology
Ask people what their blood type is and they’ll respond with O, A, B, or AB, followed by a positive or negative. Ask Guy Maestre, and you’ll get a very different story. Turns out that beyond these basics, humans have about 450 different blood types, most of which are common to everyone. However, 30 of these types differ from one person to the next.
“We all have different characteristics, but we’re never typed or matched for those additional blood types because of the limitations in the current technology,” says Maestre, president and CEO of PhenoTech, Inc., a company that develops novel blood typing reagents.
Spinning Out of the University
Philadelphia-based PhenoTech was created in September 2003 as a spinout from the University of Pennsylvania to develop a new generation of blood typing and diagnostic reagents that should dramatically change the way blood typing is being conducted today.
“Right now, blood typing is done by agglutination, or clotting,” Maestre says. Technicians mix red blood cells with a reagent and look for a clot. The only way to determine the blood type is to have one tube per reagent. This results in a very lengthy and expensive process-which is why doctors limit the blood typing and matching to just A, B, O and Rh (positive/negative).
“These are the most critical types, because if you are mismatched with one of those three, you might be dead within 10 minutes,” Maestre says. “But there are also about six or seven other types that we should definitely have information about and be matched for when we get a blood transfusion. Unfortunately, because of the current limitations, we are not.”
The Importance of Early-Stage Funding
Maestre joined PhenoTech in April 2004, when the company really started to get going. He formed a relationship with Ben Franklin Technology Partners (BFTP) at the New Jersey Venture Fair.
“A Ben Franklin representative was assigned to our company as a mentor to make sure our presentation was on target,” says Maestre. “He really liked the technology and the management of PhenoTech,” Maestre says. “After a rigorous evaluation, Ben Franklin decided to invest $250,000 in the company. Since then, they have been very active-they attend board meetings as observers, and they have been extremely supportive in all of our activities, including when we’ve needed funding from the government or other sources.”
A New Way of Blood Typing
PhenoTech’s technology can introduce multiple reagents (named NEAT reagents) at the same time with red blood cells and determine an expanded blood type in a single pass. This will allow physicians to make a better match between patient’s and donor’s blood and alleviate the adverse reactions that can happen with transfusing partially incompatible blood.
According to Maestre, PhenoTech stands apart from the other companies competing for its market space in that it’s the only company that can multiplex the blood typing reaction. “It would be possible to do a multiplex with the current technology, but it would require doing one tube per reagent, so if you wanted to do 10 reagents, you would need 10 tubes,” he says. “Nobody else out there can do a multiplex in such a time and cost-effective manner as we can with our NEAT reagents,” Maestre says.
PhenoTech currently has three employees, and they plan to hire more “provided we get additional funding from the National Institutes of Health and local sources,” Maestre says.
For the next 12 to 18 months, Maestre says PhenoTech will continue to focus on the current technology. “After that, we plan to look at different applications in blood typing and blood banking as well as other diagnostic and forensic applications,” he says.
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