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 60s. He carried it with him to a laboratory in the basement of 1093 Beacon Street 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 70s, 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.