Meet the 91-year-old Brookline philanthropist and scientist on a quest to develop artificial blood

André Danesh came to the U.S. in 1956 with $67, a Persian carpet and the words of a family friend in his ear: “Gold is everywhere. The people are rich. One day you’re washing windows and the next you’ll be driving a Cadillac.”

When Danesh, an Iranian Jew and a transfer student from the University of Tehran, began studying chemistry in Terre Haute, Indiana, he didn’t see anyone washing windows, and there were hardly any Cadillacs.

“He was a fast talker,” Danesh said of the family friend in an interview with Brookline.News.

Danesh, 91, who holds a chemistry Ph.D. from the University of Montpellier, found success in the U.S. as an investor and chemical salesman. The long-time Brookline resident is also an active philanthropist, and has his name, along with his wife Marilyn’s, affixed to a senior residence on Centre Street operated by Hebrew Senior Life.

Now Danesh is returning to his scientific roots, breathing new life into a dream of developing artificial blood.

His recent donation to Brandeis University, where his grandson Dillon Wilder is a freshman, is fueling an early-stage scientific collaboration into artificial oxygen carriers led by Brandeis and involving research teams at Northeastern University and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Danesh said he has donated a total of $1 million to the three universities so far.

“I was planning to open a laboratory, but at my age, I’m too old, and here I’ve had the opportunity to find three wonderful geniuses,” Danesh said.

A medical ‘holy grail’

Over the past half-century, many have attempted to solve the complex puzzle of developing an artificial blood substitute—dubbed the “holy grail of trauma medicine”—-that can safely carry oxygen through the bloodstream.

Blood shortages  in rural areas are a persistent problem, and a 40% decline  in blood donations over the last 20 years has further increased the urgency for a breakthrough. There is still no widely accepted  FDA-approved product used as an alternative to human blood, although there have been a few encouraging advancements: Last year, the government invested $46 million into the product ErythroMyr , and the NIH in March granted a research team led by Pennsylvania State University $2.7 million  to fund new efforts.

“This is something that’s really challenging to do, both from the perspective of getting the oxygen binding energy correct and also developing something that is non-toxic,” said Jarad Mason, a Harvard chemistry professor whose lab started working on developing an artificial oxygen carrier a few years ago.

He added that advances in chemistry, material science and nanoscience over the last two decades make it a promising time for pushing the envelope to develop “something that can actually be clinically relevant.”

“I would say that the jury is still out on which of several different approaches will ultimately have the best chance for success,” he said.

A decades-long goal

For Danesh, the idea to design synthetic blood has been a preoccupation for more than 60 years, dating back to his time as a researcher at Sorbonne University in Paris in the late 1960s. He carried it with him to a laboratory in the basement of 1093 Beacon St. in Brookline, where the young, iron-willed chemist pursued multiple avenues of funding to continue his research.

He wrote a letter to his father and his brother, Mansour, in Iran asking them for $10,000, but the response was discouraging. “They said everybody who goes to America sends money back to their parents in Iran,” he recalls in his 2023 autobiography shared with his friends and family and ghostwritten by Brett M. Rhyne.

He even corresponded  with the U.S. Army, asking them to approve a grant proposal. He finally received a letter back in 1973.

But in 1971, his second child, Sonya, was born. Short on cash, he shifted his focus from research to a career in chemical distribution, and later ventured into the worlds of investment banking and real estate, becoming president of Allied Financial Corporation. The New York Times once called  him an investor with an “unusual perspective,” using the “intuition and calculation” he learned in science to invest in bankrupt companies and turn a profit.

Danesh says he never stopped thinking of himself as a chemist: “I have always been a scientist. I never give up.”

He has several patents  for the use of the amino acids researchers are experimenting with. Spinning ideas into inventions is a common pastime for Danesh. In the 1970s, he also developed an edible additive that neutralized mercury contamination in seafood, which he called Merc-U-Rid, and created Fluorigum, a fluoride-infused gum, that never got approved by the FDA—but which he continued to make and give to his son Erik and his classmates.

A ‘high-risk’ project

Professor Ira Alan Weinstock, an inorganic chemist on the artificial blood project from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev says the novelty of Danesh’s idea makes it “high-risk,” a daring approach with high returns if it works.

Weinstock says he and the other two head researchers, professors Bing Xu (Brandeis) and Sunny Zhou (Northeastern) keep an ongoing dialogue with Danesh, sending him progress reports every two weeks, “He looks at them, understands them, and responds to them,” said Weinstock, who added that he and Danesh “speak the same language” as inorganic chemists.

Price, toxicity, short shelf life and low storage temperatures are all obstacles to creating a molecule that safely carries oxygen through the bloodstream, but Danesh has an “out of the box” approach, Weinstock says.

Danesh’s idea, Weinstock explained, involves using inexpensive, nontoxic, stable protein components to replace the function of porphyrins—a group of chemicals that are essential to making the hemes in hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in red blood cells.

“As an inorganic chemist looking at the literature over the last 100 years of what’s been published? No one has made a complex exactly like the kind that we’re talking about here,” he said.

Three factors—the molecule’s efficacy, how nontoxic it is and its stability at room temperature—would determine the possible uses. It could save the lives of those waiting for a transfusion in rural areas without easy access to blood by buying them more time. “Or if it’s much more effective and non-toxic, then it could also be something which would be used in place of blood which is in a blood bank,” Weinstock said.

A family legacy

The artificial blood research, Danesh says, is the legacy he wants to leave behind for his family.

Danesh wants to follow the example of Jonas Salk, the virologist who created the polio vaccine. “He just gave it free—-his patent, free. I’m copying him. He was Jewish. I’m Jewish. That was for humanity. That’s a Jewish tradition. Nothing more or less,” Danesh said.

Before changing his name and settling in Brookline, Danesh grew up as Nasser Israeli in Borujerd, about 250 miles southwest of Tehran, as the third oldest of nine siblings in a predominantly Muslim community. His father, a leader in a tight-knit Jewish community of about 500, had become wealthy as an importer-exporter of dried goods during World War I and later shared his wealth with the community, Danesh recounted.

“He helped because it was a small community,” Danesh said. “I learned to be generous, compassionate, caring for human beings like my father did. Just copy my father.”

The researchers, Weinstock said, are about three months into a two-year program, with the goal of having a laboratory prototype by the end—still years away from animal testing and clinical testing with human patients, which is contingent on passing a strict FDA approval process.

Weinstock’s current goal is to prove that the approach can be successful.

“My one job, as I see it, is to demonstrate that his idea can work,” said Weinstock. “That is 99% of my focus right now starting out. Because if we can demonstrate that, then everything else follows.”

Danesh says he’s cautiously optimistic about the research. “I don’t give up, even if I have to achieve something for a new generation. And I want to establish the foundation of how to make this,” he said.

Pioneering the Future of Medicine:

Dr. Andre Danesh's Vision for the Artificial Blood Institute

Dr. Andre Danesh, a chemist, businessman, philanthropist, and most importantly a researcher, whose focus has been on the copy of hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers (HBOCs), is announcing the Artificial Blood Institute with the goal creating a safe and effective artificial blood composition for transfusion into humans. Danesh is 90 years old and wants to see his research become the next frontier in science as it relates to the development of blood substitutes. 

Dr. Danesh has spent years working on the development of artificial oxygen carriers, often known as blood substitutes. At 90 years old, Danesh said, “…I have had this dream of making artificial hemoglobin my whole life and I am excited to work with researchers worldwide to bring this concept to fruition”. 

Currently, there are no FDA-approved blood substitutes for use in surgery, childbirth, blood vessel rupture or other extreme blood loss situations. While some have been partially approved, they can only be used in case of emergency due to the risk of side effects. 

Danesh now wants to share his research with the world by creating the Andre Danesh Artificial Blood Institute, a platform on which Danesh will make his new US patent application available worldwide for the good of mankind.

“It is at this time that I see the work that I’ve spent years developing be put out to the world to make an even stronger impact and that our discoveries will make a difference, helping to save many lives in the future.” 

Organometallic compounds

As a chemist, Dr. Danesh’s passion started when working on organo-metallic compounds, mostly amino acids with iron and other metals, while at his lab at UMass Boston in 1967. In his laboratory, the Danesh lab focused on using iron chelates for iron-deficient calciferous soil – soil that will not allow iron to be absorbed by fruit trees. This was a great win because he sold his patent for $10,000 to W.R. Grace, which made his product and then returned to working on blood substitutes for iron deficiency. 

A year later, Danesh worked with the U.S. Army and submitted a proposal to copy hemoglobin with amino acids (see here).  Working alongside some of the brightest scientists from some of the top universities, Danesh, MIT, and Northwestern University were invited to present the research in Washington, DC. Unfortunately, Danesh closed his laboratory and decided the timing wasn’t right. This was when he decided to move into chemical sales and put this research on the back burner. 

During these years, Danesh’s focus shifted towards his growing family and he became a successful capitalist who didn’t return to the lab, even though he did receive funding from the Department of the Army. “I was so angry and unhappy. I had missed the opportunity.” Little did Andre know what his future would hold and the impact he would have on others as a businessman, family man, and philanthropist. 

A new opportunity

Danesh grew up in a small Orthodox Jewish community in Borudjerd, Iran. As a chemistry student at the University of Tehran, Danesh transferred to university in France after one year, and then to Indiana State University, where he earned his bachelor's degrees in chemistry and mathematics. After college, he returned to France to earn his Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of Montpellier in 1962. This was quite fast, and often unusual for someone to finish graduate studies in chemistry in two years, but while earning his Ph.D., Danesh discovered how to purify chromium chelate by adding ammonium to it to get ammonium salt. “…after four or five months working…I was able to discover a number of new products and I went to my professor and he looked at it and said, “This is magnificent, it’s wonderful, you’ve solved the problem.” “As a result, I was able to finish my Ph.D. in two years.”

After earning his Ph.D., Danesh went to do his postdoc at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he met his wife Marilyn (CAS ’67) before returning to France as a research associate at the Sorbonne. Then Andre’s family grew and his eldest, Erik, was born. As a family, they decided to move to Boston, where Danesh took a professorship in chemistry at the University of Massachusetts. After one year, he left UMASS and opened his laboratory, Massachusetts Research Laboratories, Inc., focusing on iron chelates. He then went on to become a successful stock and real estate investor, and most recently, a philanthropist. Due to growing up as a Jew in a Muslim neighborhood, Danesh knows what it is to be underrepresented. Today, Danesh has funded many organizations, big and small, but often with a sympathetic approach because when he arrived in America, he only had 67 dollars and a Persian carpet. Still,  it was his trials and tribulations that led to his success today. “I am proud of my adopted country, which has given me freedom of religion and allowed me to be successful”, said Danesh.

Now in retirement, Danesh has been able to return to his true passion for research. 

The Artificial Blood Institute’s goal is the creation of a safe and effective artificial blood composition for transfusion into humans that is low in cost to produce and stable over extended periods of time. The Institute has developed a concept for the creation for such an artificial blood product and has recently filed several patent applications in the United States for this composition. Now, the institute is publicly disclosing its artificial blood concept on this website and is seeking those involved in research, especially those involved in research on artificial blood and/or iron complexes of amino acids, to cooperate with the Institute in bringing such an artificial blood composition to commercialization, in an effort to stop blood shortages worldwide.  Research shows that the global supply of blood for use in life-saving transfusions is insufficient to match the international demand.

Dr. Andre Danesh has identified over 100 different amino acids that the Artificial Blood Institute will be working on.  After being approached by many local institutions, Danesh knew it was going to take too long to see the fruit of his labor come to fruition. Now, Dr. Danesh is calling on other scientists worldwide, to prepare and make iron chelates in his patent, to find which one of these chelates is an oxygen carrier. (see here)

AI could be used to select the best of Dr. Danesh’s amino acids or a combination of the amino acids in this invention as an oxygen career. In addition, it may be  advisable to add human, or animal enzymes, in combination with iron chelates before or after oxygenations. 

We invite those who are interested to be in touch with us at www.daneshbloodinstitute.org