Haima Therapeutics Receives Phase II SBIR award from the National Science Foundation to Develop its SynthoPlate Product
APRIL 16, 2020. Cleveland, OH. Haima Therapeutics (“Haima”) has been awarded a $750,000 Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support the development of SynthoPlate, a platelet-inspired, IV-injectable hemostatic technology to mitigate bleeding in patients with bleeding dysfunctions such as non-compressible hemorrhage after traumatic injury, bleeding complications in surgery or in postpartum hemorrhage, and bleeding risks in patients with platelet and coagulation defects.
Non-compressible hemorrhage remains one of the leading causes of preventable deaths in our society. While blood component transfusion is the best option to mitigate such hemorrhage, such blood products are mostly unavailable during pre-hospital transportation, as well as in many hospitals. Additionally, blood product availability suffers from severe logistical challenges during calamity and pandemic situations, e.g., in the current COVID-19 scenario where blood donations are severely affected. A product like SynthoPlate addresses this unmet need by providing a ‘synthetic platelet surrogate’ that can be administered at the point-of-injury and point-of-care to stabilize and potentially save the lives of patients actively hemorrhaging or at bleeding risk.
“We are very excited to receive this SBIR funding and other support from NSF to advance SynthoPlate as a potential treatment to mitigate bleeding in trauma and other hemorrhagic complications. NSF’s support will allow us to scale up manufacturing of SynthoPlate, which is a major milestone for translation into the clinic” said Dr. Michael Bruckman, Chief Operating Officer of Haima and Principle Investigator on the grant.
“The clinical impact of Haima’s novel product has exciting implications and potential benefits that include reducing our need for allogeneic blood products. This has been an important consideration for transfusion medicine for many years. Their continued support and progress are very exciting.” said Dr. Jerrold Levy, Haima Scientific Advisory Board member.
“This Phase II SBIR award from NSF is the combined result of an excellent team of researchers in my laboratory at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), where SynthoPlate was originally developed, and the team at Haima Therapeutics with the vision to address a critical need.” said Dr. Anirban Sen Gupta, Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Haima. “The manufacturing milestones supported by this NSF-funded research will advance us towards IND-enabling studies with SynthoPlate in the near future” he added.
The funding from NSF will support the transfer and scale-up of the manufacture of SynthoPlate from the laboratories at Haima to a GMP-compliant contract manufacturing organization (CMO), a critical requirement for regulatory approval and clinical evaluation. These studies build on the Phase I SBIR award of $225,000 from NSF that Haima received in 2018 to study batch-to-batch quality control in manufacturing of SynthoPlate as well as evaluating its shelf-life.
The studies under this grant build on previous work supported by awards from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Department of Defense. These four back-to-back awards have led to Haima receiving about $1.4M in non-dilutive funding to support the translational advancement of SynthoPlate.
About Haima Therapeutics:
Haima Therapeutics is a pre-clinical stage biotechnology company developing platelet-inspired technologies for the treatment of a variety of blood-related diseases. Haima’s initial focus is on platelet’s primary responsibility, hemostasis, wherein they are developing bio-inspired therapies to mitigate bleeding in multiple therapeutic indications, including traumatic injury, surgery, and thrombocytopenia. Haima’s lead product is called SynthoPlate, a novel, fully-synthetic hemostatic technology that mitigates bleeding by acting at the site of injury and amplifying your body’s natural clotting mechanisms.
Learn more at www.haimatherapeutics.com, follow us on twitter @HaimaThr, or email us at info@haimatherapeutics.com
The research to be performed is supported by National Science Foundation Award Number 1951301. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Science Foundation.