FEATURE The Story of Bo Hayner and BiobancUSA Lincoln survived some of the worst fighting of the Second World War and tells some of the stories that he never mentioned during almost 40 years of silence. Jan 2008

Don Huntington

A revolution is unfolding in our Monterey Hills. Bo Hayner is leading a team of scientists, medical doctors, and technology specialists in implementing a simple but amazing procedure that will forever transform health-care.

For decades science fiction writers have written about suspended animation as a means by which an individual could move through time without aging. In such books as Robert A. Heinlein’s Door Into Summer, people’s bodies could be immersed in a sub-freezing environment causing their biological processes to effectively cease.

After a passage of years — perhaps decades —they could be warmed, their minds and bodies would again begin to function, and they would awaken as out of a deep sleep to gaze upon the world of the future with no memory of the intervening time-span and with bodies as youthful as when they had first fallen into their cold sleep.

A Reserve Army Against Disease
This kind of suspended animation remains within the purview of science fiction, but a surprising company located here on Monterey Peninsula, called Bio_Banc_USA, is applying the principle of sub-freezing animation of white blood cells and has thus made it possible for any person being able to send into their future white blood cells as a youthful supply of disease-fighting troops. White blood cells perform an essential role as agents in our body’s ongoing war against infections. You can picture them as warriors, like the 300 Spartans, who go to battle against the massed Persian hordes of attacking germs and bacteria.

As we age, these white blood-cell soldiers begin to grow old and to fail, as well. Also, the invaders sometimes compromise and destroy the white-blood-cells.

A man of 60 can no longer fight against prostate cancer as effectively as when he was in his 20s or 30s. A 55-year-old woman’s white blood cells will be less effective in battling against breast cancer than when she was 30. Seniors above 65 are thousands of times more likely to have complications from flu than are young people.

In effect, BioBancUSA provides the ability to create for you a reserve army of healthy and youthful soldiers in your personal war against disease. You can have the assurance of mind that you can always call upon these reserve soldiers ready to combat the enemy in whatever desperate battle against invading hordes that has begun to wage in your body.

Scientists all over the world are now creating a vast array of new weapons for the white-blood-cell warriors to use in future battles against illness. They will be able to make of your white blood cells a super warrior Green Beret-type soldier class, called Dendritics. These will be trained and equipped to destroy particular cancers or infections, taking no captives.

The process of donating a store of white blood cells at the BioBancUSA facility is about the same as donating a pint of blood. Nobody knows how long white cells stored at the BiobancUSA facility will remain viable. We know from experience that they remain unchanged for at least 18 years. There’s no reason to imagine that the length of time isn’t indefinite.

A store of white blood cells taken from our own bodies and someday infused back into our bodies would help us combat illness and disease. Plus, such a store, if genetically reengineered, will equip us individually to take advantage of marvelous cures that are now being created, when they arrive.

Who knows if suspended animation will ever be more than a science fiction fantasy? But the ability to create a Reserve Army of white blood cells that you can send into the future to some day do battle against diseases is a current reality at BioBancUSA.

The Story of Bo Hayner, Warrior
In March 2006 Robert (Bo) Hayner started BioBancUSA. Doctors had approached him about looking at the technology of collecting, processing, and storing white blood cells.

Bo was fascinated by the potential because it didn’t require much of a leap of faith to see where the revolutionary technology was heading.

Bo has a personal story as a warrior, both in the military and the business world, that resonates with the battle that his technology is waging against disease. He was born in Okalahoma City in 1947 and grew up in Wichita Falls, Texas.

Bo was born with a love for flight, and flying became a serious occupation when Bo joined the Army, got into military flight school, learned to fly helicopters, and was promoted to Warrant Officer.

This was in the middle of the Vietnam War and the American military was losing helicopters in a steady stream that, by the end of the war, would amount to about 5,500 downed helicopters with the crews often being wounded or killed in their destruction.

He attended flight school at Fort Walter, Texas, in 1966 and then received advanced training at Fort Rucker, Alabama. Following his graduation from Fort Rucker, Bo was given a month’s leave and was then posted to Vietnam.

Bo was shocked by what he discovered in Vietnam. It was his first experience out of the United States and Vietnam provided more of an educational experience than he was prepared for. Almost before jet lag was over he found himself flying close air support in a Huey Gunship out of Chu Chi, which was 25 miles north of Saigon.

He was thrown right into the middle of the 1968 Tet Offensive and began flying missions in support of nearby Tonsanut airbase. On one particularly memorable morning Bo was shot down three times before 10:00 a.m.

The first time his aircraft was downed by enemy fire, he was able to land in a safe zone.

He returned to base and, even though he wasn’t checked out on the machine, he jumped into the front seat of a Cobra Gunship and sat on a cushion that was still stained and sticky with the blood of the pilot who had been killed by enemy fire just a few minutes earlier. That helicopter took so much hostile fire that Bo had to crash land for the second time.

He then jumped into a third helicopter and began doing battle with hostile forces that he could see running across the runway trying to blow up aircraft. When an enemy round forced down that third aircraft, Bo jumped into his wingman’s chopper. “Let’s go home,” he said. They flew back to Chu Chi.

"We opened the bar that day," Bo says with a grin. And then added, “We probably closed it too."

“I don’t know how many times I got shot down during my two tours of duty,” Bo says. “Six or seven, at least.” Then with another grin he added, “After the fourth time I quit counting.”

He especially remembers an incident where his helicopter took a round in the “swatch plate” which was part of the control system. “The plate disintegrated about three feet off the ground, the aircraft rolled onto its side, and yet we all lived,” Bo said — his amazement still evident almost 40 years after the event.

He said that the pilots flying those Cobras and Hueys didn’t need to use the gun sights that were part of their automatic weapon systems.

“You didn’t need to aim them,” Bo said, “because you could simply walk the line of tracers into whatever target you could find. The mini-guns on those helicopters fired as much as 4,000 rounds a minute. It was as simple as spraying something with a hose.”

Bo extended his first tour in Vietnam so he could transition to Cobras from the older Hueys. He wanted to come back for his second tour ready to go to work on the sleeker, faster, and more deadly machines.

“The Cobra was faster, more streamlined, with more electronics,” Bo said. “The controls were beneath your right hand. The gun was between your legs. It was an efficient fighting machine.”

Bo was awarded three Distinguished Flying Crosses. During the 1968 Tet Offensive he was awarded two Silver Stars. One of them was for pulling the crew out of a helicopter that had been shot down.

The other Silver Star was awarded when he and his crew were shot down in Cambodia.

“The Seals and Green Berets walked in and walked us out,” Bo remembers. “They couldn’t fly in because of how heavy the anti-aircraft fire was.”

“We weren’t supposed to be in Cambodia in the first place,” Bo recalls. “They didn’t know whether to court marshal us or give us an award,” he said with obvious glee.

His only injury during all the fighting occurred during a mortar attack in the middle of the night when he rolled out of his sack and cut one of his fingers in a fan.

“I wouldn’t accept the Purple Heart for any injury as piddling as that,” he said with another grin.

When Bo returned home following his first tour of duty, after all the terrible experiences he had endured and the deaths that he had witnessed, he was still not old enough to legally buy liquor.

During his two tours of duty, Bo advanced in rank from Warrant Officer to Captain. Following the war he moved through a series of commands and became eligible for retirement as Dean of the Procurement and Acquisition school at Fort Lee, Virginia in 1989.

Bo Hayner, Businessman and Entrepreneur
Bo mustered out of the service as a Lieutenant Colonel, with a three year “moratorium.” He had sat on the Acquisitions Board, which disqualified him to work for any of the companies that the Procurement and Acquisition school had awarded contracts to.

He worked for a while with the CEO and Vice Chairman of the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). One of the programs he brought to the company was a drug eradication project used in Thailand and Burma that SAIC repurposed for a Drug Eradication Program in South America.

Three years later Bo founded Carmel Applied Technologies Inc. (CATI) to implement his dream of building visual systems for flight- and ground-simulators on inexpensive PCs.

The company was in a good niche marketing a $35,000 product that directly competed against — and worked better than — mainframe-based products selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars each.

“We are still the only company in the world that is FAA certified for level C- and D- flight simulators,” Bo said.

He started CATI with two people and 13 years later, in February 2005, when the company was doing $22 million worth of contracts a year, he sold it to Alion Corporation.

He could have retired in complete comfort but a year and a month later he founded BioBancUSA.

He says that he actually had to go to work because when he told his wife he was going to retire, she replied, “Not in this house.”

She actually said, “If you don’t go back to work, I’m going to.” Bo knew that was never going to happen.

A Bulwark Against Disease
Bo had become fascinated by the possibilities and potentials as he learned about the immune system’s role as the body’s first line of defense against disease.

He saw what a good idea it was to store white blood cells when a person is healthy. Twenty years old is best, the doctors say, but even 60 is still good. BioBank actually has specimens from a few 80+ year old people. And one woman in her 90s.

The elderly participate in the project because of the certain fact that even old blood cells, if healthy, could help ward off illness and disease.

“The thing that really sold me during my investigation and research,” Bo said. “was looking at the cancer rates.” About 46% of the people who contract cancer succumb to the disease. That’s too high a percentage, in Bo’s thinking.

His engineering mind ferreted out one of the main reasons for the loss: the frequency and dosage of treatments must be coordinated with the body’s white blood cell count. When too many of them are lost the body stands unprotected against invaders and a person could die of a common cold.

Even worse, Bo discovered that some of the most deadly cancers, such as melanoma and pancreatic, simply can’t be treated by doses of chemical or radiation.

However, both of those cancers have responded in almost miraculous ways to therapy based upon the re_-engineered white blood cells.

Storing white blood cells is a good idea because of the protection they might also provide against the effects of severe injury. The bone marrow of a person who has suffered some brutal trauma — for example, a serious automobile accident — ceases to function. If the condition persists after several days the number of white blood cells in the body begins to decline.

Between five and seven days the body becomes susceptible to any kind of virus or disease. Death will usually follow.

This grim scenario could be easily prevented if a store of the patient’s white blood cells could have been made available for a doctor to inject back into the victim.

The possible application of the technology for battlefield use is obvious. Or for anti-terrorist applications. For example, the cancer rates in the 40,000 people affected by the fall-out of 911 almost tripled. The BioBanc technology offers an obvious remedy for this kind of dismaying problem.

An infusion of healthy white blood cells will also reinforce the potency of inoculations by increasing the ability of vaccination-introduced-proteins to mount an effective protection against disease.

Stored white blood cells become like insurance. They are essentially a bio insurance against the threats of attacking illnesses. It’s been estimated that at least 80 different diseases could be combated by the procedure.

Stem cells, one of the components of white blood cells, can be removed from the umbilical cord following birth. There must be a match with a host DNA (usually a close relative) or the body will regard the cells as being invaders. But when there is a match, doctors can kill the patient’s immune system, replacing it with donor white blood cells.

The procedure has been successfully carried out in about 8,000 test cases of cancer — nearly all of them during the past six years. The success rate is phenomenal! Prostate Therapy will receive FDA approval by the middle of 2008.

The technology has also been amazingly effective in combating late-stage pancreatic cancer.

BioBancUSA’s business has evolved to include storing umbilical cord blood, which becomes available for patients who have not stored their own white blood cells.

When it comes to fighting disease, not just any white blood cells will do. Cells implanted back into the donor's own body are called “autologous.” Unlike donor cells, these white blood cells provide a source of immunity that the body will never reject.

Also, cells reinfused into the donors themselves have the advantage of carrying all the immunities that the donor had picked up — from whooping cough and mumps, for example. Donor t-cells create an immune system like a new-born.

BioBanc stores between 1.7 to 3.7 billion cells in each storage container. A small packet will contain 200 million. When put into use technicians can multiply (ampliphy) the blood cells in two separate processes and thus create a sizeable percentage of replacement for the subject.

The first ampliphication can add 25%, which is many more blood cells than will be required.

“Our mission is to create and build global life science companies focused on the rapid delivery of unique, high value products.” Bo said.

“It’s fascinating to be able to cure oneself with a part of your body that had been stored for decades,” he added.

White blood cell technology offers the possibility of creating a force for health that will change the character and nature of disease prevention. Cancers and other horrible diseases will someday disappear or be cured by a remedy as simple as fixing a hang-nail.

We are all looking forward to that day!

For more information about Biobanc, see www.biobancusa.com, call 888-246-2262, or send an email to info@biobancusa.com. Send any comments on the article to editors@65mag.com.