Innovation - Helinx, Nucleic Acid-Targeting Technology
Making blood safe. This innovation promises an almost unimaginable advance in basic medicine and health— a technology that inactivates known and emerging viruses and other pathogens in the world's blood supply. In the United States, blood is only screened for six specific viruses and one bacterium. Pathogens that cause such diseases as cytomegalovirus, Kaposi's sarcoma, sepsis, Lyme disease, and malaria routinely escape detection. In developing nations, an estimated 13 million units of completely untested blood are transfused each year, much of it potentially tainted with HIV.
This winning technology, known as Helinx, uses compounds that target and react with DNA and RNA to inactivate disease-causing organisms. The first application of the Helinx technology, the Intercept Blood Systems, exploits the fact that while blood components such as red blood cells, plasma, and platelets do not contain nucleic acids, viruses and bacteria do. Consequently, by exposing ...
