Mr. Glassell: The company was founded back in 1991. The three original founders were all Bay Area scientists affiliated with UC San Francisco (UCSF) and UC Berkeley, contributing different skill sets. One of them, Dr. Larry Corash, he is still with us as our Chief Medical Officer. In the 1980s, while working at UCSF, Larry witnessed firsthand the HIV tragedy, where his patients were transfused with tainted blood components and got infected with AIDS. That motivated him to research whether we could prevent transfusion transmission of HIV and other pathogens. He worked together with skilled chemists from UC Berkeley, and they took a very clever approach. They designed a system to inactivate any kind of pathogen, whether it's a recognized pathogen or not, to prevent these threats to blood safety.
TWST: How does that work?
Mr. Glassell: If you want to think of it as an analogy, think about pasteurizing milk. By heating the milk, in this case you basically kill bacteria that might be present. This is different from conventional blood safety techniques used today, which rely on excluding particular blood donors who may present a higher risk and on testing donated blood for a limited set of specific pathogens. The technology developed by Cerus, what is now called the INTERCEPT Blood System, can cross-link both DNA or RNA, which prevents an organism or cell's ability to divide and multiply. Blood components don't require intact DNA or RNA to function. However, most types of pathogens, including viruses, parasites and bacteria, do contain DNA or RNA. When their nucleic acid is cross-linked during the treatment, the pathogens essentially die.
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