Kim Vandegriff - Biography

Kim Vandegriff received her PhD in biochemistry from Rice University in the field of oxygen transport in blood and was a lecturer at Rice from 1984-86. In 1986, she began working in the Blood Research Division at the Letterman Army Research Institute in San Francisco She subsequently became an editor at Science magazine.
In 1993, Dr. Vandegriff moved to the University of California San Diego (UCSD), where she was a co-investigator on a multidisciplinary team working in a grant program funded by the NIH to study blood substitutes. She was critically important to the theoretical and experimental implementation of an artificial capillary study and in vivo microvascular systems developed at UCSD, which confirmed the scientific basis underlying Sangart’s innovative theories of oxygen transport.
Dr. Vandegriff has made important contributions to the understanding of the molecular mechanisms of oxygen transfer by cell-free hemoglobin, with over 50 publications in the field. She also developed a powerful method to measure hemoglobin’s oxygen binding properties.
In 1998, she and her co-inventor on several significant hemoglobin-based oxygen transport patents left UCSD to found Sangart, Inc. Dr. Vandegriff was the co-inventor on all of the important patents that became the basis of Sangart’s technology and is a co-inventor with Ashok Malavalli on the VS-101 patents..