The Rumor Mill

Duncan Ross BIO

In 2002, my Oceanographer father and I were faced with an almost impossible decision. The chemotherapy we were using to treat his leukemia was no longer functional, and we were forced to choose an immunological approach, bone marrow stem cell transplantation (BMT), for which the rate of survival was 50%. We hesitated for so long that when we finally decided on BMT he was no longer eligible. I clearly remember meekly, and humiliatingly, offering a well known transplant expert, Dr. Karen Ballen at Massachusetts General Hospital, a paper on Copper supplementation for the treatment of AML. She politely thanked me and raised her hand in a negative response. After this encounter, and two years before his death, I enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Miami. I obtained an 8 year dual education in the departments of biochemistry and immunology and I am today still trying to control disease using immunological molecular approaches. One of the directions that showed early promise in chronic GVHD after BMT was the use of mesenchymal stromal cells to suppress rejection. My study of immunological manipulation, in concert with the understanding I developed in 2014 of what the ‘paracrine effect’ of cell communication really means (exosomes), has led our company down a path that has resulted in multiple FDA IND applications in process, and our position as one of the most well respected groups in exosome science.

I am happy to contribute to the body of knowledge of exosome research. Feel free to ask us for our protein, mRNA, or miRNA research results that help us define the evolving science that is cellular signalling.

In 2020 Kimera Labs filed an IND for the treatment of symptoms related to COVID-19 infection and is in process with the FDA.