Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow

Scientists say they’ve worked out how to make blood by the gallon, and maybe just in time to save their company.

The development “promises to provide an almost limitless supply suitable for transfusion into any patient” say the Times, which “would also eliminate the risk of transmitting the pathogens that cause hepatitis, HIV and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) through transfusions”. This means that “blood donations and vampire bites may one day be a thing of the past” according to one blogger.

Blood has published the paper as an advance online publication, and according to the abstract Shi-Jiang Lu, of Advanced Cell Technology, and colleagues show that it is feasible that embryonic stem cells can be used to create functional oxygen carrying red blood cells at high yields (10¹⁰ to10¹¹ red blood cells per six-well plate of embryonic stem cells). They are not the first group to create red blood cells this way, but they are the first to do it on this scale.

Medical News Today highlighted that “stem-cell originated red blood cells were more like fetal and embryonic blood cells than adult cells, they did show some adult cell characteristics after maturing in vitro.” Similarly, the American Red Cross told Scientific American that while the work is “pioneering,” the technique “has not progressed to the stage where the cultured cells are fully equivalent “to real red blood cells”. This is just one of the issues to sort out before this blood can be used for transfusions.

Susan Shurin, from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, also explained to Scientific American that there are sugars on the surface of the cells and if the immune system sees them as risky, it could kill the cells. But she called the new work an “important first step”.

The researchers are now trying to make blood cells using reprogrammed adult cells, called induced pluripotent stem cells, while according to Reuters Advanced Cell Technology, which is one of a few commercial ventures trying to make a business out of the emerging stem cell field, “is desperately seeking investors to keep it afloat”.

“The team at Massachusetts-based Advanced Cell Technology hopes the finding might help save the struggling company,” says the wire service.

Image: blood cells / National Cancer Institute via Wikimedia