In pur­suit of bet­ter he­parin man­u­fac­tur­ing process, Gink­go teams up with an Ohio-based biotech

The man­u­fac­tur­ing process to make biosyn­thet­ic he­parin, a drug used for pre­vent­ing blood clots, is not a par­tic­u­lar­ly clean one.

In a slaugh­ter­house, some­one must re­move the in­tes­tine cas­ings from a pig. The mu­cos­al lin­ings are then scraped. The steps to get he­parin are enor­mous, and the process is com­pli­cat­ed.

“It’s not like you kill a pig and you have he­parin,” Ohio-based Op­ti­mvia CEO Kei­th Klee­man told End­points News in an in­ter­view. “It’s a filthy, dis­gust­ing place for a med­ica­tion to start. I can’t think of a more dis­gust­ing place for an im­por­tant med­i­cine to start.”

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