Magnetics Business & Technology - September/October 2022 - 7

FEATURE ARTICLE
variety of lysis buffers and methodologies.
" There is a particular interaction called
pi-pi stacking, which is strictly quantum
mechanical in nature, so it's a bit difficult
to describe, " explains Kevin Hagedorn,
president of the company and its
manufacturing specialist. " However, what
makes it unique is that it requires the
nucleic acids to adopt a particular conformation
and bind tightly to the carbon surface.
This makes it difficult for the bound
RNA to be attacked and helps stabilize
improves patient adherence and reduces costs. " It's already
being used in at-home colon cancer screening kits produced by
another biotech company, Exact Sciences, a provider of cancer
screening and diagnostic tests.
Kevin Hagedorn
it. Attaching and releasing RNA from the carbon surface uses
Calcium, a milk additive, and EDTA, a common food preservative
so the process is safe and scalable. "
" We're currently selling the product to university labs and working
on securing larger contracts. We're working with Central Michigan
University to simplify wastewater testing for COVID-19. This
is an application where the longer you transport the sample the
more RNA you lose which makes it difficult to say how many
people in a community have COVID-19. If you can stabilize the
sample once it's collected you monitor individual communities
with far higher accuracy and sensitivity. "
" Another related application we're working on is at-home RNA
urine testing. There are a range of conditions from prostate
cancer to kidney transplant rejection that you can detect from the
RNA in urine samples, by providing a simple method to collect
and stabilize samples we can expand at-home testing which
Based in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, Life Magnetics has raised
about $2 million from various investors, National Science
Foundation grants and other sources to pursue its goals while
developing its products along the way. About $1.3 million came
recently from a crowd-funding by 250 Michigan investors. " The
big application is room temperature RNA therapeutics. We don't
have the funding to go straight after those applications though,
so we're checking off easier applications to de-risk the technology
for investors and generate early revenue, " notes Hagedorn.
" The first step was purification, which just required binding and
release of RNA. However, it's a common problem in labs. All biology
labs that do RNA work need purification products. Now we're
on to at-home and environmental testing, which requires shipping.
We're starting to develop collaborations in synthetic RNA
manufacturing and RNA drug delivery. Our research projects
include making the carbon bio-absorbable so the particles don't
linger in the body. "
The long-term goal is delivery of RNA therapeutics. " Vaccines
were the ideal first application for RNA therapeutics because
you only take them once. One investor once asked, 'what about
drugs you take every day, we can't have a -80C freezer in everyone's
house.' That's exactly the problem. For RNA technology to
really take off there needs to be a way to deliver room temperature
RNA therapeutics. " For more info, see www.magnetics.life
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Magnetics Business & Technology - September/October 2022

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