Five Minutes with Carolyn Yarina, CEO of Sisu Global Health

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

On a visit to a clinic in rural India, Carolyn Yarina saw a need for a device that can separate blood into plasma and white and red cells — without electricity to power a centrifuge.

In a West African hospital, her business partner Gillian Henker watched as doctors used what was essentially a cup to collect and reuse blood from internal bleeding after running out of expensive bags of donor blood.

The ideas prompted the women, along with colleague Katie Kirsch, to found Sisu Global Health. Starting with a device known as Hemafuse, which can better help doctors recycle patients' blood, they plan to build a pipeline of medical devices that might be rudimentary compared to others being developed in the United States but could save millions of lives in other parts of the world.

The concept and the opportunity it presents is drawing attention to Sisu — including the $100,000 investment from AOL co-founder Steve Case the company won in his "Rise of the Rest" live pitch competition Monday. That money will go toward a $700,000 round of investment Sisu is raising to pay for studies needed to put Hemafuse on the market in Ghana.

Source: Baltimore Sun (link opens in a new window)

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