Afghanistan is a country of difficult terrain and the extremes of temperature that go with it. The heat of the Afghani plains can be searing; in the mountains, the mercury can dip far below freezing. It’s a challenging landscape for military forces—particularly when soldiers or support personnel are injured.
In late 2001, when the U.S. military began operations in the Middle Eastern country, it soon realized that it needed to be able to keep blood supplies for surgical teams that are “far forward”—that is, deep in a battle area—at a constant temperature; blood can be “spoiled” by heat or cold. The U.S. military and its Walter Reed Army Institute of Research medical facility in Maryland solicited solutions.
They found what they were looking for in a product designed by Minnesota inventor Bill Mayer. That product, the Golden Hour, became the foundation of Plymouth-based Minnesota Thermal Science. Now the company is expanding as it seeks to develop new markets for its products in the medical area and elsewhere.
The original Golden Hour container accommodates up to four blood units, keeping them at a constant temperature whether the air outside is near zero or approaching 100 degrees. (A larger version is now available that holds 17 units.) “The solutions the military were using at the time were OK in normal conditions, but once you got into very cold or very hot conditions, it just wasn’t working,” says Tom Anderson, Minnesota Thermal Science’s president and CEO since 2005, one year after the company was founded.
The Golden Hour’s basic technology is a “passive thermal” system that slows the BTUs coming through it, much in the same way a frozen gel pack keeps beverages cold in a cooler. The company’s portable medic pack holds blood and other chilled medical supplies for more than 72 hours in a variety of weather conditions. The reusable, iceless container has a removable two-liter insert—creating “a box inside a box,” Anderson says—that is cooled ahead of time in a standard freezer or refrigerator.
“We were the only ones who could provide a solution that met [the military’s] requirements,” Anderson says. The Golden Hour received the U.S. Army’s Greatest Invention award in 2003.
Now Minnesota Thermal, which employs 22, is ramping up efforts to expand its “cold chain packaging” technology, which it sells under the Credo brand name, to markets besides the military. Applications that the company has been pursuing include the transport and storage of vaccines, biomedical materials, reagents, and other temperature-sensitive medical materials. Current and potential customers include blood banks, pharmaceutical companies, and research labs. In January, the company added a vice president of sales and a vice president of business development as part of its expansion.
