Paragonix CEO Lisa Anderson’s quest to build better organ transport systems

Paragonix co-founder and CEO Lisa Anderson offers advice for other device developers as her startup helps organs safely ship to recipients.

Paragonix Technologies co-founder, CEO and President Lisa Anderson [Photo courtesy of Paragonix Technologies]

As a complex disease researcher, Lisa Anderson couldn’t believe how crude the packaging was for a donor organ she received while studying type 1 diabetes.

“What I was looking at at the time was a pancreas that was stored in a couple of sterile plastic bags filled with a solution, and then literally placed in a cooler filled with crushed ice,” she recalled. “To me, that was a very archaic way of transporting a precious human organ.”

So she called the agency that provided the organ and asked whether next time they could package the pancreas just as they would for a human transplant.

“There was a long pause on the line,…

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Scientists create first human-monkey embryo

In this monkey-human embryo, human cells glow in red. [Image courtesy of Weizhi Ji / Kunming University of Science and Technology]A group of scientists from the U.S. and China injected human stem cells into 132 macaque embryos, which then developed for up to 20 days.

While the research holds promise for organ transplants, studying disease and testing new drugs, it also prompts controversy.

Get the full story from our sister site, Drug Discovery & Development. 

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