He spent a quarter-century taking the oxygen out of stored blood - and turning a contrarian hunch into an authorized medical device.
The founder, mid-mission. Two decades in, the idea finally had a label on a box.
Donated blood does not sit still. From the moment a unit of red cells leaves a donor's arm, oxygen starts working against it. The cells stiffen, leak, and slowly lose the very quality that makes a transfusion worth giving. For most of modern medicine, this was simply accepted as the cost of keeping blood on a shelf. Martin Cannon refused to accept it.
His answer was almost rude in its simplicity: take the oxygen out. Store red blood cells in a low-oxygen, low-carbon-dioxide environment and you slow the decay - the storage lesion, in the trade's language - that nobody else seemed in a hurry to fix. That bet became Hemanext, the Lexington, Massachusetts company he founded and ran for more than two decades.
The trouble with being early is that you have to wait for the rest of the world to agree with you. When Cannon started, the clinical understanding of what made stored blood "good" was thin. He built the device anyway, then spent years assembling the science, the patents, and the regulators to back it up. By the time he stepped down in September 2023, Hemanext ONE had U.S. FDA marketing authorization, a European CE Mark, and patients across the EU already receiving transfusions made with it.
The creation of Hemanext from an intriguing idea to a transforming force in the vast arena of transfusion dependent therapy has been an enormously fulfilling challenge and a deeply satisfying success.- Martin Cannon, on retiring as founder & CEO
Start with the unlikely part. The intellectual property that seeded Hemanext came out of Los Alamos National Laboratory - the New Mexico institution better known for physics than phlebotomy. Cannon took that licensed science and pointed it at a stubborn, unglamorous problem in transfusion medicine. The original company traces to 1997; in 2007 it merged with New Health Sciences, forming the foundation of the business that exists today. The next year, an NIH grant helped push the work forward. The headcount in those early days was about four people.
From there, the story is less a rocket launch than a long climb. Building a medical device is not the kind of thing that rewards impatience. You need the bench science, then the animal data, then the human data, then the regulators, then the hospitals - each gate guarded by people whose job is to say "prove it." Cannon's contribution was less a single eureka moment than a refusal to stop. He recognized the potential to improve red blood cell quality at a moment when most of the field had not yet decided the problem was worth solving.
There is a particular kind of founder who treats a decade like a quarter. Cannon ran Hemanext for the better part of 25 years, and the numbers reflect the duration as much as the ambition: more than 200 patents secured around the world, over $150 million raised across equity and NIH funding, and a body of scientific evidence built unit by unit, study by study. The patent portfolio alone tells you something - it is the paper trail of a company that kept inventing rather than coasting on a single claim.
The technology itself is easy to state and hard to execute. Conventional blood storage leaves red cells swimming in oxygen and carbon dioxide, which accelerates their degradation over the weeks they spend on a shelf. Hemanext's approach removes those gases before storage, holding the cells in a hypoxic state designed to keep them closer to the condition they were in when they left the donor. The flagship product, Hemanext ONE, became the first blood processing and storage system to earn a standards-compliant seal from AABB, the body that sets the rules for transfusion practice.
For a founder who spent years being early, the validation came in a cluster. Hemanext secured both U.S. FDA marketing authorization and a CE Mark - the European clearance that turns a promising device into a sellable one. Then came the part that matters most outside a boardroom: real patients in the European Union began receiving transfusions using the Hemanext ONE system. The theory was now a transfusion in a real arm in a real hospital. That is the line between an interesting paper and a working product, and Cannon's company had crossed it.
In 2021, Hemanext's hypoxic blood storage study was recognized as a notable clinical milestone - one more brick in the wall of evidence that the contrarian premise held up. None of this happened on a venture-capital timetable. It happened on the slower clock of clinical proof, which is exactly the clock Cannon seemed willing to run on.
Most founder departures are quiet, or worse. Cannon's came bundled with good news. In September 2023, Hemanext announced that he would retire as president and CEO, handing the role to Andrew Dunham, the company's longtime chief technology officer - a successor from inside the lab rather than a parachute from outside. The same announcement carried a $25 million B1 funding round and underlined the regulatory wins. It read less like an ending and more like a baton pass at full stride.
Cannon did not vanish. He stayed on to support the new leadership and turned his attention to the next generation - advising early-stage companies and mentoring aspiring entrepreneurs, putting two decades of scar tissue and pattern recognition to work for founders just starting their own long climbs. There is a logic to it. A man who waited 25 years for an idea to be believed has a great deal to teach anyone tempted to quit in year three.
Strip away the patents and the funding rounds and you are left with a simple, human stake. Transfusions are among the most common procedures in medicine, and the quality of stored blood touches everyone from trauma patients to people who depend on transfusion as ongoing therapy. Improving what is in the bag is not a niche optimization; it is a quiet upgrade to a piece of infrastructure that millions of people rely on without ever thinking about it. Cannon's career was a bet that this invisible thing was worth a lifetime of attention.
He was educated at the University of Oxford and built his company in the biotech corridor outside Boston, but the throughline of his story is not a place or a pedigree. It is duration - the willingness to be right slowly. In an industry that prizes the fast pivot, Martin Cannon's signature move was to find one hard, real problem and stay on it until the device worked, the regulators signed, and the patients showed up.
Grew Hemanext from a four-person startup into a recognized name in red blood cell transfusion technology.
Built a worldwide patent portfolio - the paper trail of a company that kept inventing for two decades.
Combined equity investment and NIH funding, deployed across the long arc of clinical development.
Secured U.S. marketing authorization and European clearance - the two gates that turn a device into a product.
Turned hypoxic storage from a concept into a device, with EU patients receiving Hemanext ONE transfusions.
Hemanext ONE became the first blood processing and storage system to earn a standards-compliant AABB seal.
The core technology traces back to a license from Los Alamos National Laboratory - a national weapons-and-science lab, repurposed for blood.
His retirement arrived bundled with a $25M funding round and a CE Mark - a rare exit-on-a-high in medtech.
He handed the CEO seat to the company's own chief technology officer, not an outside hire.
Educated at the University of Oxford, he built his company in the Boston biotech corridor.
He ran the same idea for roughly 25 years - a quarter-century version of the overnight success.
Post-retirement, he flipped from operator to mentor, advising early-stage founders.