Blaze Medical Devices gears up for clinical trials

Not all bio-tech innovations coming out of Ann Arbor originate from the University of Michigan. Blaze Medical Devices is an example of private developers that went to the university looking for help to commercialize a product that optimizes blood transfusions.”It was a piece of technology that I invented a long time ago,” says Michael Tarasev, founder of Blaze Medical Devices. “It was something I felt could do good for everybody, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it so I approached the university.”With the university’s assistance, in 2006 Tarasev put together an executive team to develop the product, a system that focuses on quality control and optimization for the blood banking and transfusion industry. It is used to analyze stored blood to allow clinicians to predict the effectiveness of transfusions by assessing the levels and rates of quality loss during storage for individual units.The company recently received a microloan from the Michigan Microloan Fund to put towards its first clinical trial and to hire its first employee on top of its three founding partners.”We have to first test for this storage and the viability for red blood cells,” Tarasev says.Source: Michael Tarasev, founder of Blaze Medical DevicesWriter: Jon Zemke