HemoShear moves into new home in Charlottesville

Published May 29, 2014 by Robert Powell, III

HemoShear, a human-disease biology company, has moved into a newly renovated space in Charlottesville.

The company now occupies 16,000 square feet of laboratory and office space in the Cardwell Building in the former Martha Jefferson Hospital building on Locust Avenue. The site also provides access to an additional 12,000 square feet of space to meet the company’s future  needs.

HemoShear, founded in 2008, said the new site will allow it to form partnerships with major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies while expanding its research and development capabilities.
“This move is an important milestone in HemoShear’s progress,” Jim Powers, the company’s CEO, said in a statement. “Our research and development partnerships in vascular and liver diseases with major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are growing in number and scope as the value of our platform becomes widely recognized.

“At the same time, we are accelerating the pace of development of new human biology systems, including tumors and rare diseases, which will lead to more partnerships requiring greater operational capacity and scientific expertise. HemoShear now has the capital base and the infrastructure to accommodate its growth over the next several years.”

HemoShear works on projects designed to create safer and more effective therapies for patients.

The company says it is helping to change the way drugs are discovered and developed. Instead of traditional scientific methods and animal studies, HemoShear uses biological systems that it says more accurately represent human response.

The company announced earlier this month that it had completed an equity offering that raised $8.7 million. Since 2008, the company has received a total of $22 million in private equity financing, as well as $10 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health and other state and federal sources.