John L. Gainer is an American chemical engineer and co-founder and chief scientific officer of Diffusion Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology and pharmaceutical company based in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States.
Education
Gainer earned a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering from West Virginia University in 1960, and a Doctor of Philosophy in chemical engineering in 1964 from the University of Delaware. In the early 1970s, he studied the prediction of diffusion rates of gases in liquids and began to investigate oxygen diffusion in biological systems, focusing particularly on the cardiovascular disease atherosclerosis.
Career
Gainer pioneered investigation into the mechanism of action underlying oxygen diffusion-enhancing compounds (ODECs) and invented the subclass of ODECs known as bipolar transport carotenoid salts. The lead compound of this class is transport sodium crocetinate (TSC) which Gainer invented while a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Virginia. He later accepted a professorship in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia.
While at the University of Virginia, Gainer invented TSC by modifying certain natural products, including saffron, resulting in the creation of a novel single transport isomer carotenoid salt.
Using animal models, he then investigated the activity of TSC, exploring his theory that the drug would increase the transfer of oxygen through blood plasma into hypoxic tissues. The drug"s clinical promise became evident when Gainer and colleagues demonstrated that TSC could improve survival in animal models of severe hemorrhage while reversing the drop in blood pressure that accompanies the loss of large amounts of blood.
From his work with animal models, Gainer also predicted that TSC held promise for the treatment of cancer, stroke, myocardial infarction (heart attack), and other diseases associated with hypoxia and ischemia (a lack of oxygen delivery to tissues). He was awarded the first of over a dozen patents on ODECs and TSC in 2000.
Membership
He has been a member of the International Society on Oxygen Transport to Tissue since 1973, the year that the society was formed.