December 16, 2025 – Vancouver biotech company Avivo has been selected for NATO’s 2026 Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) Innovators Cohort.

October 9, 2025 – Researchers recently transplanted a donor kidney after converting it from blood type A to the universal type O, removing a major barriers in organ donation: blood-type compatibility.

June 23, 2022 – ABOzymes Biomedical Inc., announced it has completed a substantially upsized seed financing. The funds will be used to further develop its ground-breaking proprietary platform that enables a world where a patient’s blood type is no longer the first constraint when they need life-saving organ transplants or blood transfusions.

May 11, 2022 – Peter Rahfeld, Co-founder & CSO at ABOzymes Biomedical Inc., talks about eliminating the barrier of blood groups and allowing transfusions between all blood types.

March 31, 2022 – Genome British Columbia awarded funding to ABOzymes for the ongoing development of a novel process to convert blood group A kidney donor organs to universal blood group O, in a preclinical transplant model with the ultimate objective of meeting the global demand for kidney transplantation.

February 16, 2022 – Proof-of-concept study demonstrating that human lungs from a type A donor can be treated with the enzymes for a few hours and emerge with the cellular appearance of having O blood type.

June 24, 2021 – Nature, the high-impact scientific journal, has listed ABOzymes among its ‘Ones to Watch’ list as part of its international Spinoff Prize competition. This competition highlights start-up companies emerging at universities that are transforming research data into commercial offerings for biomedicine and technology.

April 2, 2021 – Switchboard Public Relations spoke to John Barclay, Vice President of Business Development at ABOzymes, about how the entrepreneurship@UBC and New Ventures BC programs helped them along their journey, what the use cases are for their technology and when we can expect to see a world without blood types.

August 27, 2020 – We are thrilled to announce we have advanced to the Top 10 of this year’s New Ventures BC competition. We’ve completed our pitch to the judges and look forward to the awards ceremony in November.

June 10, 2019 – Researchers analyzing bacteria in the human gut have discovered that microbes that produce two enzymes that can convert the common type A into a more universally accepted type. If the process pans out, blood specialists suggest it could revolutionize blood donation and transfusion.