Blood transfusions save lives, but supply doesn鈥檛 always meet demand, which can lead to fatal consequences. Soon, we will be able to end that problem by making blood in the lab on demand, with no donors required.
Transfusions depend on armies of donors and complex networks for collecting and storing donated blood. Some countries are unable to build the infrastructure required to do this. Even in developed nations, hospitals can run short of supplies for people belonging to particular blood groups.
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Such problems would be solved if we had a way to make effective artificial blood. One such type of lab-made blood will be tested in people for the first time in 2019.
Blood has a lot of functions, but the most crucial is bringing oxygen to the tissues of the body. This job is done by red blood cells, which are packed with an oxygen-binding protein called haemoglobin. There have been several attempts to make artificial haemoglobin or to use animal versions of the protein, but these have hit problems, prompting researchers to try another angle: producing whole red blood cells instead.
In the body, these cells are made by a kind of stem cell that normally lives in bone marrow. To make new red blood cells in the lab, Allison Blair at the University of Bristol, UK, and her colleagues have extracted some of these stem cells and nurtured them so they multiply and start to produce functioning red blood cells.
Next year, 10 healthy volunteers will be injected with just a teaspoon each of fluid containing these cells. The cells will be labelled with a mildly radioactive tracer, to see how long they survive in the body compared with ordinary cells.
In a further advance, to cut out the need for a continual supply of stem cell donors, another team has developed a way to make these stem cells live forever in the lab. 鈥淭hat gives you almost a limitless supply,鈥� says Blair.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淣ews Preview 2019: Artificial blood to the rescue鈥�
