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Friday, December 19, 2008
Salmon help biotechs in blood and spinal regeneration market
By Mass High Tech staff
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Maine marine biotech company Sea Run Holdings Inc., after 12 years of development, is ready to cast a net into the blood and spinal regeneration markets using salmon-plasma proteins.
Freeport-based Sea Run has been developing two major product platforms. One of them is Sea Stat CNS, a salmon fibrin product the company claims can minimize the damage caused by spinal cord and traumatic brain injury. The other is Sea Stat HS, which helps clot blood and can potentially seal torn or wounded tissue.
The company is looking to move to human clinical trials in the next year. Thereafter, it wants to find a much larger partner for the sales and marketing efforts, explained Evelyn Sawyer, Sea Run’s president and CEO.
One of the unique advantages of its technologies is that the supply of their source, farmed salmon blood, is abundant. Worldwide, farmers annually harvest 1 million metric tons of salmon, and Maine is one of the largest contributors to that take, said Sawyer. In fact, there is a chance that anyone who eats a Maine-raised salmon may have eaten one of Sea Run’s blood donors, she said.
The founders launched the company originally in 1984 for salmon aquaculture, explained Sawyer. However, in 1996, after the mad cow disease crisis, the company’s leaders saw an opportunity in biotech, replacing bovine-based products with salmon ones. “If you can get a product from a cow, you can probably get it from a fish,” she said. “They are vertebrates, their plasma and proteins are 70 percent homologous to ours, and they have similar red blood cells and proteins.”
Product testing has been positive on animals, Sawyer said. The Sea Stat CNS product has been applied successfully on brain- and spine-injured animals to suppress inflammation and pain and even regenerate neurons.
Also promising, according to the company, is Sea Stat HM, which forms a clot for traumatic arterial bleeding. Four years ago, the U.S. Army tested Sea Stat HM on rats with hip crush injuries. The test was meant to simulate a typically fatal bullet wound to the hip. Sea Stat HM reduced blood loss and improved animal survival rates, said Sawyer.
While biomedical and pharmaceutical companies have been using zebra fish for testing and research for some time, this direct application of salmon products to humans is unique, said Steve Aldrich, vice president of business development for Beverly-based Marine Biotech Inc., a maker of high-tech aquarium systems. While Sea Run’s salmon-centric approach sounds a bit esoteric, “it’s fascinating stuff.”
For funding, over the past five years, Sea Run has received more than $4 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health and the U.S Dept. of Defense. It also sells salmon plasma and protein reagents to test labs, through a distributor. The company is currently evaluating if it needs more funding to pay for the human trials, said Sawyer.
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