Greetings,
These news articles about Biopure and its product Hemopure look pretty good to me. It shows a company working with recognized authorities the way they should. It is yet to be determined just how useful any Biopure product will be in the blood substitute arena, but it is encouraging that there is no indication the company is trying to skirt procedural rules established by bona fide medical authorities. The warning side of these news stories appears to target investors more so than scientist. Scientists know there is no completely safe medical procedure, they all have faults since physiology differs from person to person. For this reason scientist try to build studies designed to measure effectiveness and relative safety. Hemopure could cause a few people to die with heart failure and still pass stringent studies of effectiveness and relative safety.
As I see it, news reports so far, including critical ones, look pretty promising. Biotechnical companies receive lots of scrutiny and critical media coverage—they are familiar with it. Also, biotechnical companies routinely keep information close—there is no hard and fast rule that incidents should be publicly released on an ongoing basis. This is nothing new as if occasional incidents of secrecy to the media should be alarming. Critical news about Hemopure is nowhere near damning in comparison to media criticisms some other medical products have received. That journalists take time to write and print this sort of criticism is good, but no one should take it as authoritative, at least from what I have read here. Also, these articles have not made the worst accusation of all, which would be accusations that Biopure is skirting or trying to skirt authoritative scientific procedure. It seems to me that Biopure is working with good science. Whether its efforts will prove successful with Hemopure is yet to be see, but they have made great strides in that direction, farther than anyone else has so far. If not sooner then later I believe we will see this technology succeed. If Biopure survives the financial pressures of bringing a new medical product to market, they will probably reap rewards, and I think that is the main thrust of those articles, for investors to watch carefully. Like everyone else, including Biopure, we can only sit and wait for results. So, though criticism is good and part of the process, until we see results of scientific studies what we hear from naysayers is no more dependable than any other incomplete picture.
As a side note, whether hemoglobin based artificial oxygen agents are successful or not have little or no bearing on the WTS’ current policy on blood, for many reasons.
"Each unit of Hemopure consists of 30 grams of hemoglobin that has been extracted from bovine red blood cells, ultra-purified, chemically cross-linked and formulated in 250 milliliters of a balanced salt solution. These stabilized, non-cellular hemoglobin molecules circulate in plasma (the fluid part of blood) when infused and are much smaller, have lower viscosity (resistance to flow) and more readily release oxygen to tissues than red blood cells." See http://www.biopure.com/oxy_therapeutics/home_oxyther.html
Translation:
Each 9 ounces of Hemopure contains about 1 ounce of hemoglobin. This represents approximately a 1 to 8 ratio of hemoglobin to all other ingredients. How does that compare with whole blood? Whole blood has approximately 1 part of hemoglobin to 19 parts of all other ingredients. In terms of hemoglobin, Hemopure turns out to be bloodier than whole blood. (See disclaimer)
Disclaimer: Readers should verify this math, it was done hastily.
