Today, the UK National Health Service announced it plans to start transfusing people with artificial blood by 2017 – the first clinical trials of this kind in the world. New Scientist takes a look at how and why artificial blood is made.
What is artificial blood and are there many different types?
Blood substitutes aim to replicate one particular job of real blood: supplying oxygen to tissues. In other words, the goal is to find an alternative to oxygen-carrying red blood cells that could be used for transfusions. Some researchers are working on blood substitutes based on the haemoglobin molecule that binds oxygen in red blood cells. One such product – Hemopure – is based on bovine haemoglobin, and was approved for human use in South Africa back in 2001. Others are investigating whether it’s possible to make entirely synthetic substitutes based on oxygen-carrying molecules like perfluorocarbons. The NHS version is based around real red blood cells that were generated in the lab.
How are these cells made and will it work?
From stem cells. Researchers have previously managed to take hematopoietic stem cells from volunteers’ bone marrow and encourage them to grow into red blood cells using chemical growth factors. The NHS will probably use a similar approach, although it also plans to explore using blood from umbilical cords – another rich source of hematopoietic stem cells. In 2008, Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer at Advanced Cell Technology – in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and his colleagues first grew red blood cells on a large scale in the lab. Luc Douay at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France, and his colleagues performed the first small transfusion of lab-grown red blood cells into human volunteers in 2011. About 50 per cent still circulating in the blood 26 days after the transfusion, these artificial blood cells behaved just like normal red blood cells.
Hurdles?
Perhaps there is still one more hurdle to overcome – volume. Although Douay and Lanza’s team was able to generate billion of cells, it is only a small portion of the number of cells that would be needed for a single transfusion. It will be a big challenge to scale up the technology to generate enough artificial cells for regular transfusion.
The NHS says alternative supplies could become increasingly vital for its day-to-day operations as new volunteers giving blood fell in England and North Wales by 40 per cent last year……
See full story on newscientist.com
Image: Ann Cutting/Getty
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