It’s easy to understand Shayn Peirce-Cottler’s sense of pride at the success of HemoSonics, a company transforming how doctors manage bleeding and clotting during organ transplants, heart or trauma surgery and other critical procedures. Its technology helps avoid risky transfusions, leading to fewer complications while saving scarce blood resources for patients who most need them.
“In terms of taking research at the bench — being done in a lab led by a Ph.D. student and their advisors — to a multinational company, HemoSonics is arguably the biggest commercialization success our department has had since our founding in 1963,” said Peirce-Cottler, professor and chair of the University of Virginia Department of Biomedical Engineering.
That growth and impact hasn’t gone unnoticed. The company earned excellence awards in 2023, 2024 and 2025 from the Medical Device Network, made Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Companies” and Time’s “Best Inventions” lists in 2024, and was a finalist for a 2024 Edison Award. Forbes also featured the company last year.
Peirce-Cottler vividly recalls co-founder and chief scientific officer Francesco Viola’s lab bench when HemoSonics was just an idea. They were both Ph.D. students at UVA then, working in neighboring BME labs. Recently, she visited HemoSonics’ 45,000-square-foot facility in Durham, North Carolina.
“What started out as barely more than a pile of circuit boards, wires and some blood collection tubing on a bench in the MR5 building back in 2002 has become a beautiful manufacturing facility with gorgeous research and development labs,” Peirce-Cottler said.
“It literally brought tears to my eyes to see that, and the gigantic warehouse filled with boxes with the company label on the outside, knowing they would be shipped to hospitals all over the world to diagnose and help treat patients with life-threatening blood clotting disorders.”
It all started when Viola and his Ph.D. advisor, former UVA biomedical engineering professor William F. Walker, tested the ultrasonic technology he was developing on a sample of blood clotting in a test tube.
“We were impressed by our ability to measure in real time as the blood sample transforms from liquid to solid,” Viola said. “From that moment on, it took us a long time — and many discussions with physicians at the UVA School of Medicine — to link that lab observation to a tool that could help minimize and optimize blood transfusions.”
Minimizing transfusion is critical, both to manage chronic worldwide blood shortages and because blood products — whether whole or constituent parts like platelets or plasma — carry risks, including disease transmission and allergic reactions.
From Lab Discovery to Life-Saving Device
That tool became HemoSonics’ Quantra Hemostasis System. Hemostasis refers to the balance between bleeding and clotting.
Quantra analyzes a blood sample, inserted in a single-use cartridge, in about 15 minutes. A readout displays how quickly the blood clots, its firmness, and the rates at which it clots and dissolves. It gives clinicians the information they need to decide which, if any, blood products to administer, as well as how much, to manage bleeding.
And it can all be done at the bedside.
“Quantra provides a holistic picture of blood coagulation pretty quickly, so the provider can order treatments that are needed faster,” said Dr. Michael Mazzeffi, the George Rich Professor of Anesthesiology at the UVA School of Medicine, adding that its easy-to-understand results are especially helpful to users.
One reason other systems tend to be in hospital labs — and not in trauma bays or operating rooms — is the nuanced expertise required to interpret the test numbers. Quantra’s algorithms remove that barrier, so even newer residents and fellows don’t have to wait on a pathologist’s report.
Quantra runs on technology called Sonic Estimation of Elasticity via Resonance Sonorheometry. SEER is an evolution of technologies initially developed at UVA by Viola and Walker with UVA School of Medicine professor emeritus Michael Lawrence, an expert in the biochemistry of blood coagulation.
Inside the cartridge, ultrasound pulses cause the sample to vibrate. These resonations send back signals as the blood clots and dissolves.
“From these signals we can extrapolate the functions of the various components of blood such as platelets, fibrinogen, etc.,” Viola said. “There is a treatment available for each one. By measuring them, we can identify which component is deficient or compromised, so the clinical team can optimize their transfusion treatments.”
When Viola and Walker first conceived the “sonorheometry” approach, they were working on a different project to measure the flow behavior, or rheology, of the fluid that fills our eyes to detect signs of degradation that can cause vision problems.
But after a chance seminar on hemostasis, they shifted their focus to blood, leading to that first successful clotting experiment in 2002.
It took a long time — and many discussions with UVA physicians — to link our lab observation to a tool that could help minimize and optimize blood transfusions.
Around the same time, an entrepreneurial ecosystem was beginning to blossom at UVA and in Charlottesville, Viola recalled.
“It was just the perfect time to take off on this journey,” he said. “There were starting to be increasing touch points with UVA’s Darden School of Business, especially in the biosciences and biomedical engineering.
“That allowed many of us to begin understanding how to craft business plans, investor pitches, etc.”
In 2010, Viola left his position as a UVA research professor to become HemoSonics’ first employee. With offices in Charlottesville and funding support from numerous local angel investors, the Wallace H. Coulter Translational Research Partnership with UVA and the National Institutes of Health, the team had a production unit of the Quantra in the field acquiring data to submit for U.S. Food and Drug Administration review by 2017.
That same year, the leadership team, including Viola, Walker and their investors, sold the company to Stago, an international leader in automated blood analysis systems. Viola remained with HemoSonics, whose headquarters also moved to North Carolina, where its manufacturing and R&D base was already established.
Global Adoption and Proven Benefits
Cleared for use in the European Union, the first Quantra unit was sold in Germany in June 2018. Today, it’s used in facilities across Europe and in Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand and the U.S.
Quantra’s initial FDA clearance came in 2019 for cardiac and major orthopedic surgery. Approved uses have since expanded to trauma and liver transplants — giving Quantra the broadest range of FDA-cleared clinical uses of any testing system in its class, according to HemoSonics president and CEO Bob Roda.
UVA Health uses the system in operating rooms and the intensive care unit for heart surgeries, liver and lung transplants, trauma, and bleeding during and after pregnancy — and it has made a difference, Mazzeffi said.
“Before, you’d have to wait longer for results or do what we call empiric transfusion, where you guess what the problem is and just give blood products to treat it,” he said. “If you’re a patient, you don’t want a blood transfusion unless you need it.”
Maximizing a patient’s own blood and minimizing exposure to those products — a practice known as patient blood management — improves outcomes by avoiding risks such as an allergic or immune response, disease transmission, receiving too much blood and other complications.
If you’re a patient, you don’t want a blood transfusion unless you need it.
Quantra can also pinpoint problems that other tests can’t, Mazzeffi said, recalling a transplant patient who needed a drug to reverse the effect of the blood thinner heparin.
“Quantra can very specifically detect residual heparin effect, so we were able to figure out what this patient needed, and they got better,” he said.
Studies conducted at two facilities and published in the Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery and Journal of Cardiac Surgery, respectively, found implementing Quantra systems correlated with an up to 90% reduction in the use of blood components in the first case and a nearly 30% drop in volume of transfused blood products in the second.
Understanding how blood components function is also critical for avoiding unwanted blood clots. Viola sees Quantra expanding in that area, too.
“Thus far, the predominant use of the system has been to manage the bleeding side,” he said. “People are often anticoagulated to prevent unnecessary clots that could obstruct a vessel and blood flow. The Quantra could be used in that case to manage anticoagulation needs for patients.”
All the more reason for Peirce-Cottler to feel good about the company her department helped create — and which she personally supported.
“I was one of the many graduate student volunteers who donated our blood so Fra could test out his instrument with it,” she said, referring to Viola by his nickname. “You could say I have ‘blood equity’ in HemoSonics.”