San Diego’s Sangart Readying for Clinical Trials of ‘Oxygen Therapeutic’

When I reported last month that San Diego-based Sangart had raised $50 million in additional venture funding, CEO Brian O’Callaghan was eager to discuss how the biopharmaceutical has progressed in a field where others ran aground. But O’Callaghan, who is every bit as Irish as his name sounds, was unavailable at the time. So I met with him recently after touring Sangart’s impressive manufacturing facility, where the company now makes an oxygen-carrying compound from donated blood that has outlived its 45-day expiration date. But don’t call Sangart’s MP4 compound a blood substitute, even though it represents the latest effort in a decades-long scientific quest for a such a substance.

“This product has been designed to have the exact molecular size, viscosity, oxygen affinity and diffusion rate as human hemoglobin,” O’Callaghan said. “What that really means is that this product carries oxygen very well, and can transport it into oxygen-starved tissue. It can get into the micro-vasculature, opens it back up, and it releases the oxygen there.”

But Sangart does not describe its compound as a blood substitute. Rather, it is a biological product the company calls an oxygen therapeutic. MP4 is an oxygen-carrying molecule that Sangart makes by chemically modifying human hemoglobin purified from donated blood. The molecule also is pegylated (i.e. treated with polyethylene glycol) which allows the MP4 compound to reach oxygen-starved tissue before releasing its oxygen molecules.

“The entire concept of a blood substitute is incorrect,” said Dr. Howard Levy, who became Sangart’s chief scientific officer in December. Blood consists of more than red blood cells, Levy explains. It is the river that also carries immune cells, clotting factors, and nutrients throughout the body. “The ideal of having a fluid that you could just hang [in an IV bag] and have it as a substitute for blood just doesn’t exist.”

In addition to overseeing clinical trials of Sangart’s MP4 oxygen therapeutic, Levy also bears the task—along with O’Callaghan—of carrying on where Sangart’s founder, the late Robert M. Winslow, left off. Winslow, who founded Sangart in 1998 and headed the company until last year, died on Feb. 2 after battling brain cancer. He came

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.