Blaze Medical Devices has been touched by an Angel. Well, its not exactly what you think, but it probably feels really close to Heaven for the people behind the company. A group of angel investors, made up of affluent entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, have put in a pretty $250,000 into Blaze Medical Devices; a recent start-up based out of Birmingham. The investors included a few people out of Great Lakes Angels and Chairman of the venture capitalist firm David Weaver declined to publicly state how much his company invested in Blaze Medical Devices. The angel investors also made the investment at a strategic time as they get a 25% tax credit from a recent Michigan economic incentive stimulus that provides investors with a quarter return on their initial investment. The tax credit would have ended for all investors on December 31st, 2011 and they got it done at an, obviously, calculated time.

Company Hopes To Make Blood Transfusions & Storaging More Efficient

So you’re probably wondering what it is exactly that these angel investors saw in BMD that was worth putting up a quarter of a million dollars for? Well, they’re in the process of developing various methods for quick and simple testing of stored blood properties that often loose a substantial amount of quality when stored. The longer blood samples are stored in their appropriate containers, the lower the quality gets and thus it is increasingly inaccurate of the donor’s ailment or condition. More often than not, testers are forced to throw out or use blood samples of poorer quality due various reasons, such as their current backlog of tests to do or technical reasons like a machine that’s out of service. The main part of Blaze’s valuation comes from their increasing ability to develop an efficient and safe way to conduct blood transfusions and reduce the amount of wasted blood. This, in turn, means more money saved for both the “transfuser” and the “transfusee”.

Red blood cell transfusions cost about $1,300 of the $2,000 it costs to get a transfusion in the United States and this amounts to a whopping $17 billion in additional costs that ripple through the already unstable US healthcare system.