Meet George Frodsham, who is a UK biochemist and has found out a way of removing disease-causing microbes from the blood by making use of magnets known as MediSieve technology. George Frodsham’s company, MediSieve, is getting ready to take on human trials as well.
George Frodsham came up with this idea of extracting viruses such as leukemia, Sepsis, and malaria from the blood years ago while studying magnetic nanoparticles and how they bind to cells in the body. The idea of MediSieve is that any kind of virus, blood cancer, or infection can be removed from the body because of small magnets. This takes out the need for any sort of medication or treatment, such as chemotherapy.
His idea soon materialized into MediSieve – a company that was spun out in 2015 from the University College London for the sake of development and commercialization of magnetic blood filtration. The company has managed to raise a total of £2.1M in equity funding and grants that total £2M. The very first human trials are slated to commence in 2020. The MediSieve system was created while making sure that it can be integrated with the current hospital pumps, thus connecting it to user-supplied bloodlines that can interface with cannulas or catheters that are used for venous access.
The MediSieve Filter is the heart of the system and is basically a single-use and disposable magnetic filter that can capture and retain magnetic components. The company has claimed that a patient’s complete blood volume can be filtered within an hour using its technology. The magnet is a mix of permanent magnets and can generate a powerful magnetic field in the area where the insertion of the filter takes place. MediSieve Particles are biocompatible magnetic particles coated with binding agents and latch themselves to specific targets only. They do not even need to enter the patient’s body. They can be injected into an external blood loop and then removed by making use of the magnetic filter.
George Frodsham said, ‘In theory, you can go after almost anything. Poisons, pathogens, viruses bacteria, anything that we can specifically bind to we can remove. So it’s a very powerful potential tool. When someone has a tumor you cut it out, Blood cancer is a tumor in the blood, so why not just take it out in the same way? Now we know it’s possible, it’s just a question of figuring out some of the details.’