Better Than Blood
UMKC’s Cuthbert Simpkins, M.D., has developed a blood loss treatment with the potential to transform blood loss and sepsis care
By JULIA WALKER
Throughout his lengthy surgical career, Cuthbert Simpkins, M.D., has carried with him the memory of patients he couldn’t save. Patients who, despite his team’s best efforts, slipped away.
Even four decades later, he still remembers the elderly woman with septic shock during his residency.
“I would sleep by the bedside, because little adjustments you can make being right there make a big difference,” Simpkins recalled. “I tried with all my might to save her life. I tried everything, and I couldn’t.”
Another patient he met as the trauma director at Louisiana State University stays with him: a young woman who had suffered massive blood loss. He and his team had done everything: blood transfusions, powerful medications, plasma, endless hours of care. But her blood pressure refused to rise.
“We stayed up all night trying to save her,” Simpkins said. “And I had to tell her mother that we couldn’t.”
Those moments – and many like them during his time as a trauma surgeon – became the fuel behind a groundbreaking idea. They challenged his confidence in the treatments and planted a question he couldn’t stop asking – “What if there was a better way?”
Years later, the answer to that question – an innovative alternative infusion treatment – now sits safely inside Simpkins’ research lab right here at UMKC.
Cuthbert Simpkins, M.D., stands inside his lab at the School of Medicine, holding the blood loss treatment he developed.
“It may save millions of lives. It may also change the way we think about the treatment of disease. The basic principle is unprecedented - the redistribution of nitric oxide. That's the fundamental scientific problem we solved.”
— Cuthbert Simpkins, M.D.
Solving a Blood Problem
Simpkin’s love for scientific research started early. His father built Simpkins’ first laboratory in his childhood home in Shreveport, Louisiana, a home that was later bombed by white supremacists. Undeterred by hate, he continued pursuing his scientific curiosity and went on to earn a chemistry degree from Amherst College and a medical degree from Harvard University.
After graduating from Harvard in 1974, Simpkins completed his surgical training in Brooklyn, New York. He then pursued research fellowships at Boston University School of Medicine and the Naval Medical Research Institute in Maryland, where he achieved the rank of Commander in the United States Navy and earned two commendations for excellence in research.
His career path led him to Washington, D.C., where he worked at D.C. General Hospital and later at R. Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, where he designed and launched the Violence Intervention Program, which still operates today. From there, Simpkins served on faculty at the State University of New York at Buffalo School of Medicine before becoming director of the Trauma Program at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center.
At LSU, Simpkins led major reforms that restored and secured national trauma certifications and reduced infection rates well below national averages. He also started his own research lab at LSU, where he continued to develop the experimental treatments for traumatic blood loss that he started in Buffalo.
Familiar with navigating setbacks, Simpkins viewed the small budgets and limited supplies during this time as creative challenges rather than roadblocks, as this allowed him to test his blood treatments under a variety of conditions and circumstances.
“The scarcity ended up being an advantage, because it made me produce a realistic situation,” Simpkins said. “I saw the advantage in the disadvantage.”
Today, Simpkins is the Sosland Missouri Endowed Chair in Trauma Services at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine and the founder, president and chief innovation officer of Vivacelle Bio, a company developing a groundbreaking treatment for hypovolemia and Multiple Organ Dysfunction Syndrome (MODS) in sepsis. The treatment is currently in late-stage clinical trials.
A popular mentor at the School of Medicine, Simpkins shares a laugh with several students inside his lab.
The VBI treatments are a milky-white concoction made from phospholipid nanoparticles that are hydrophobic, or oily. Used as an IV infusion, the treatment acts like regular IV fluids to increase blood volume and help raise blood pressure, as well as correct the overproduction of nitric oxide that occurs during hypovolemia. Because nitric oxide likes to stick to oily things, the VBI treatments absorb nitric oxide in places where there’s too much and redistribute it where there’s too little, helping rebalance how nitric oxide is spread around the body.
“It may save millions of lives,” Simpkins said. “It may also change the way we think about the treatment of disease. The basic principle is unprecedented – the redistribution of nitric oxide. That’s the fundamental scientific problem we solved.”
What began as a personal mission to save patients is now a medical innovation with the potential for global impact.
“Dr. Simpkins’ research could be truly transformative for healthcare,” said Sumeet Dua, Ph.D., vice chancellor for research and innovation at UMKC. “The ability to stabilize patients rapidly, without the need for immediate blood transfusions or antibiotics, could reshape emergency response protocols worldwide. Once commercialized, this innovation may potentially save countless lives and reduce the long-term costs of critical care by improving outcomes from the very first moments of intervention.”
Top: Simpkins (front, second from left) spends time with family members. Photo courtesy of Cuthbert Simpkins. Bottom: Simpkins speaks to a mentee inside his lab.
‘Better Than Blood’
Over the years, Simpkins has refined his research and created two products, VBI-S and VBI-1, each designed to restore intravascular volume and redistribute overproduced nitric oxide – treating relative and absolute hypovolemia and reversing hypotension and organ failure in patients who are septic or have had severe blood loss.
With FDA Phase II trials showing overwhelmingly positive results, Simpkins and his team are closer than ever to potentially changing the standard of care for treatment for hypovolemia and MODS in septic shock, which currently claim approximately 11 million lives globally each year, including 3.4 million children.
“The trial came out better than we even expected,” Simpkins said. “There were benefits that we didn’t expect. We were very happy with elevation of blood pressure, but we also had improvement in multiple organs, which has never been done by any of the medications.”
Those results have led Simpkins and his team to affectionately refer to the VBI treatments as “better than blood.”
Not only will this treatment possibly improve survival rates and organ function, but it may also solve long-standing logistical and safety challenges that come with blood donations, such as the risk of disease transmission, the need to match blood types and blood supply shortages.
“It’ll be more available, not only in the United States, but also in the developing world,” Simpkins said. “You don’t need to keep it in the refrigerator, and it has a long shelf life of about one to two years at room temperature, whereas blood only has a shelf life of 42 days.”
Adding to the list of benefits, this new treatment could also provide an alternative to the current intervention options, which pose serious health risks.
“It may reduce the number of complications that we get, like losing hands and legs, arrhythmias and other problems caused by the current medications,” Simpkins said.
VBI treatments that Simpkins developed.
Continuing Innovations and Inspiration
Now at UMKC, Simpkins continues advancing the commercialization of these treatments, while also focusing on even more innovative health solutions.
“This lab is an invention machine,” Simpkins said recently from his fourth-floor laboratory in the UMKC School of Medicine.
But the lab is more than a place for developing science. Simpkins is also nurturing the next generation of medical innovators.
“He’s developing this product and growing this company, but he’s doing so in a really impactful way by including early career scientists so they can learn not just what it’s like to work in an academic lab, but to work on a product that you’re trying to develop and impact patients,” said Dennis Ridenour, president and CEO of BioNexus KC.
One of those early career scientists is Stephen Mishriky (BLA ’24/M.D. ’25), who initially joined the lab for a two-month assignment, but kept coming back.
“He’s a mentor for me,” Mishriky said. “I’m going into surgery, and he’s a big reason why. On top of that, he introduced me to research. He encouraged me to think for myself and to think of ideas.”
Simpkins’ work has also made an impression on university leaders, who see Simpkins as central to UMKC’s commitment to advancing cutting-edge, impactful research that directly addresses real-world challenges.
“His presence elevates our institution – not only through his groundbreaking work in trauma care, but also through his collaborative approach that bridges academia, clinical practice and entrepreneurship,” Dua said. “Dr. Simpkins embodies the spirit of translational research: turning laboratory innovation into life-saving solutions.”
Simpkins credits UMKC with giving him the tools and environment to stay successful.
“The talent is here,” Simpkins said. “There are other professors here to collaborate with. The atmosphere is conducive to working together. It’s a great place to be. It’s a godsend.”
For this scientist, the real reward isn’t just access to a lab or leading a team of researchers – and it isn’t the accolades of his long and accomplished career. Of all Simpkins’ achievements – including graduating from Harvard Medical School, earning the rank of Commander in the Naval Medical Research Institute and even publishing a highly-acclaimed biography of jazz legend John Coltrane – it’s the work on the VBI treatments that means the most.
“It’s a blessing to make a discovery that – in your lifetime – is going to make a difference,” Simpkins said. “When you’re able to test it and see it come to fruition, that’s a real blessing, because in science, you’re usually not rewarded with that. Bringing it all together into something you see… a real, real blessing.” n