In 1971, Haemonetics founder Jack Latham had a vision to bring together a commitment to quality and customer service with innovation in building a company to produce blood fractionation devices.
Mr. Latham began his company by manufacturing and selling one perfectly designed component for a new blood collection device: a centrifuge disposable called the “Latham Bowl” that could automate the separation of blood. He constructed his company’s values on the belief that blood was a medical drug that needed to be respected and missteps in that regard caused considerable harm to patients. At the core of these values was his commitment to protecting patient’s safety.
The Latham Bowl technology merged expert engineering with the ground-breaking scientific discoveries of Dr. Edwin Cohn, a protein chemist and Harvard Medical School professor, who in the 1930s, pioneered techniques for fractionating blood to isolate the serum albumin protein from plasma, a discovery that led to a revolution in the blood community.
Mr. Latham knew the dangers patients can experience with whole blood transfusion, understood the potential of transfused fractionated blood products to help minimize those risks, and trusted his device would make this possible on a large scale for the benefit of patients everywhere. With that drive, he laid the foundation of what would become Haemonetics Corp.