Blood. You have five litres of the stuff flowing through your body. Not something you’re likely to think about – until you have no choice. Transfusions are a vital life-saving medical procedure; 25% of us will require donor blood at some point in our lives. However, there are risks associated with donor blood. Although strict screening measures exist, patient infection is possible, as is a rapidly-developing allergic reaction. Furthermore, only 4% of eligible blood donors in Britain donate, so there is always the problem of matching supply to demand. Scottish scientists have been working to bypass these concerns with a possibly creepy-sounding alternative – the development of so-called ‘artificial’ blood, developed in the lab from stem cells.
Cultured blood cells would be ideal in avoiding the caveats of donor blood. Aside from the possibility of harbouring infection, donor blood degrades rapidly in storage. Siphoning blood from a typical donor yields a mixture of cells, of varying age and condition – hardly ideal for a patient teetering on the brink of death. Synthetic blood would be more uniform. The Holy Grail is the large-scale creation of cells belonging to the O-negative universal donor blood group.
Previous proposed alternatives to synthetic blood have included artificial oxygen carrier molecules, but these proved inefficient and potentially dangerous. In response to such failures, a Glasgow team started an ambitious project in 2009, aiming to develop industrial quantities of safe human blood. The initial steps were met with success, despite technical hurdles. As leading researcher Jo Mountford puts it, scientists are currently working with “chemical soup”, endlessly tweaking their method, before eventually hoping to scale-up to generate the 2.2 million units of blood required by the NHS annually.
In 2010, the researchers revealed that they had succeeded in turning stem cells derived from spare IVF embryos into red blood cells, blood’s essential oxygen-carriers. Recently, researchers in Edinburgh were granted a licence to make blood, which can be tested in clinical trials.
Aside from the scientific elegance of this work, there have been other hurdles to deal with. Public polls reveal that people are put off by the idea of ‘fake’ blood, particularly if it doesn’t resemble the real thing. Oddly, the idea of utterly ‘alien’-looking blood was less disagreeable in surveys than something that does vaguely resemble human blood. Researchers therefore have to deal with the aesthetic side of blood development, not just the technicalities!
What do you think? Does the idea of masked researchers ‘growing’ blood in vials give you chills? Let us know on bangscience.org
