Lab-grown Blood Given To People in World-First Clinical Trial (bbc.com) 24
Blood that has been grown in a laboratory has been put into people in a world-first clinical trial, UK researchers say. From a report: Tiny amounts -- equivalent to a couple of spoonfuls -- are being tested to see how it performs inside the body. The bulk of blood transfusions will always rely on people regularly rolling up their sleeve to donate. But the ultimate goal is to manufacture vital, but ultra-rare, blood groups that are hard to get hold of. These are necessary for people who depend on regular blood transfusions for conditions such as sickle cell anaemia.
If the blood is not a precise match then the body starts to reject it and the treatment fails. This level of tissue-matching goes beyond the well-known A, B, AB and O blood groups. Prof Ashley Toye, from the University of Bristol, said some groups were "really, really rare" and there "might only be 10 people in the country" able to donate. At the moment, there are only three units of the "Bombay" blood group -- first identified in India -- in stock across the whole of the UK.
If the blood is not a precise match then the body starts to reject it and the treatment fails. This level of tissue-matching goes beyond the well-known A, B, AB and O blood groups. Prof Ashley Toye, from the University of Bristol, said some groups were "really, really rare" and there "might only be 10 people in the country" able to donate. At the moment, there are only three units of the "Bombay" blood group -- first identified in India -- in stock across the whole of the UK.
"Bulk will always rely on donors"? Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not 100% lab grown blood instead of donated blood, unless you're self donating?
You can ensure very tight quality control on lab-grown blood, and you won't need all the infrastructure to recruit, take, treat, test blood you take from donors.
100% lab grown blood could:
Completely end blood shortages
Completely end blood-supply-borne pathogens
Completely end rejection of blood
Completely remove the necessity of typing the recipient (lab grown blood could be grown with none of the antigens that are problematic! Think O- with other minor blood groups gone too.)
Completely remove the need to have separate stocks of blood types
Completely remove logistics of recruiting, bleeding, testing, storing, distributing, shipping blood donations
So why the assertion that "blood will always rely on donors"?
Are you truly confident that the cost of it will never drop below the costs of all the considerations I bring up above?
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This technique might lower the number of donors required, but won't eliminate the need for donors.
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In this case...
We need to start reproducing the blood from Keith Richards!!
I mean, that guy should have been dead many times over....yet he still carries on, and these days seems even more coherent than he used to be in younger days!?!?
Keith is the key to immortality.
Re:"Bulk will always rely on donors"? Why? (Score:5, Informative)
"This is how it works:
They start with a normal donation of a pint of blood (around 470ml)..."
so you still need original donors in this scheme. Also from the article, "The average blood donation costs the NHS around £130. Growing blood will cost vastly more, although the team will not say how much". So I am guessing money. I think you are underestimating the costs associated with lab grown blood. Really lab grown anythings. Immunotherapy comes to mind at 100K per vial. Maybe someday, and I am sure research will continue, but someday is not imminent.
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Well, I guess I read the article. From the article,
"This is how it works:
They start with a normal donation of a pint of blood (around 470ml)..."
so you still need original donors in this scheme. Also from the article, "The average blood donation costs the NHS around £130. Growing blood will cost vastly more, although the team will not say how much". So I am guessing money. I think you are underestimating the costs associated with lab grown blood. Really lab grown anythings. Immunotherapy comes to mind at 100K per vial. Maybe someday, and I am sure research will continue, but someday is not imminent.
I'm not certain, but I suspect after getting that first pint of blood, new synthetic blood can be cultured from synthetic blood?
Not certain, but the Red Cross is a pretty powerful organization, and this cuts into their profit center. I liken it to how every time a benefit is found from alcohol - say wine, they have to come up with a "scientists are working on isolating the compounds from the grapes that provide this benefit. They are placating the prohibition people, these folk are trying to avoid panick
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"The artificial blood will be far more expensive than conventional donation. So it is likely to be used for people with very rare blood types.
The old technique involved taking a type of stem cell that manufactures red blood cells in the body and coaxing it to do so in the lab.
However, each cell eventually burns out and produces no more than 50,000 red blood cells.
The trick developed by the Bristol team was to trap the stem cells at an early stage where th
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There's no need for "Big Blood" conspiracies to explain this.
Donations are much cheaper to handle than growing a pint in the lab. I'm guessing more than an order of magnitude.
They can't just use the stem cells forever without also re-creating an immune system to clean up naturally occurring mutations. That would be crazy expensive and depends on yet another series of discoveries yet to be made.
The only human cells that have been maintained in culture long term are cancer cells and even those have been disco
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You're right about most of this, donations are cheap to collect, it's the screening that takes up most of the cost. The Red Cross is only really in this because at the moment there isn't really anyone competing with them. There's plenty of other things for the Red Cross to do if they weren't doing this.
With lab grown blood the main expense is the culture media and the manual effort it takes to maintain the culture. It's basically a prototype process, what you'd use in a mass production process would have t
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One good thing is that if you're growing red blood cells this doesn't actually matter, for red blood cells have no nucleus.
If the stem cells go rogue, the blood produced will be defective. Perhaps even failing to kick out the nucleus to become red blood cells. So you're back to screening the product. Also, once the bad stem cells start propagating, you have to toss the whole line and start over with donated blood. We do not have the technology to scan a culture cell by cell and zap the bad ones. If we did, we could mostly do away with conventional marrow transplants and do only autologous transplants with cleaned marrow.
Individ
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One good thing is that if you're growing red blood cells this doesn't actually matter, for red blood cells have no nucleus.
If the stem cells go rogue, the blood produced will be defective. Perhaps even failing to kick out the nucleus to become red blood cells. So you're back to screening the product. Also, once the bad stem cells start propagating, you have to toss the whole line and start over with donated blood.
The chances of acquiring a mutation which disrupts nuclear ejection are reasonably low enough that it's not going to happen at a high frequency, especially without exposure to mutagens. The majority of mutations which might occur will have no effect on blood cells anyway. If you screen samples of the culture for a nucleus using microscopy (cheap), the red cells with a nucleus should stand out like a sore thumb. If you found any then frankly at that point I'd be comfortable trashing the culture and going fro
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Because they are afraid that regular blood donors will stop donating after seeing this article.
When enough lab-grown blood can be produced on industrial scale, you can be sure that we will no longer bother to ask people to give blood.
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Spoken as someone who has no idea what they are talking about.
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This has been known for several decades - and is the basis of well-established treatments for diseases like (some) leukæmias. Once you've found a bone marrow donor (I've been on the register for nearly 30 years - how long have you been registered?), the bone marrow of the person with the disease is destroyed (ch
Works Both Ways (Score:2, Insightful)
If there are only 10 people in the country that are able to donate that blood type, then there are only 10 people in the country that might NEED that blood type as a donation.
I am not a medical professional, but isn't this normally dealt with by people banking their own blood over time? Guaranteed compatibility.
Of course, the lab-grown is a fantastic thing. Being able to grow as much blood as needed means shortages can be eliminated. Vampirism will finally be treatable with a common prescription.
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If this goes too far the ruling elite will not need so many of us peasants around anymore...
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Re: Works Both Ways (Score:2)
They still have to keep us around to harvest adrenochrome.
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If there are only 10 people in the country that are able to donate that blood type, then there are only 10 people in the country that might NEED that blood type as a donation.
Not so. Most famously, there’s the case of the gentleman with a rare blood type whose blood personally saved 2.4 million newborns: https://www.sciencealert.com/o... [sciencealert.com]
The babies don’t produce the right type of blood themselves in the vast, vast majority of cases, so they generally can’t go on to be donors later for that same blood type. And that’s just the most notable example of a transient issue in which a rare blood type can save you but for which you won’t be able to donate yo
Re: Works Both Ways (Score:2)
Thank you. I had completely forgotten about that story.
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isn't this normally dealt with by people banking their own blood over time?.
Maybe as long as you plan to need it and do so no farther ahead than the shelf life of blood? The FDA currently recommends a maximum of 6 weeks of refrigerated storage and at least 8 weeks between donations.
So, it could maybe work for a one-time need 3/4 of the time if you plan everything right -- but probably not for ongoing needs, as might be needed with some treatments or conditions (in which case your own blood may not even be desirable), or if you happen to need more than one unit at a time.
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Blood has a shelf life. You can bank your own blood for pending procedures, but it will be discarded a few weeks later if it goes unused. Normal shelf life for blood, whether donated or autologous, is 35-42 days.
There is ongoing research into synthetic blood that can potentially last for months or years on the shelf and even be stored at room temperature, but the last gen
Welcome to immortality? (Score:2)
In Methuselah's Children the ordinary population (i.e. non-Families) achieve immortality with full blood replacements, using lab grown blood.
Tru Blood : ) (Score:2)
Plasma Exports (Score:2)
I listened to a show this morning describing the plasma export market. From the US it's mainly to China and the dollar value of donor plasma exports exceeds that of soybeans.
"Critical shortage", my ass.