Blood Grown in a Lab is Given to People in the World’s first Clinical Trial

 by Ashnah Elanchcheliyan

Tiny amounts of blood (equivalent to a couple of spoonfuls) are currently being tested to see how it reacts and adjusts to the body. Blood transfusions always rely on other people donating their own blood, therefore the ultimate goal of manufacturing blood is to provide blood for patients with rare blood groups that are hard to get hold of. Conditions such as sickle cell anaemia rely on regular blood transfusions - these are necessary. Professor Ashley Toye, from the University of Bristol, said that some groups were "really, really rare" and that there are a very limited number of people who can donate ("might only be 10 people in the country"). Currently, there are only three units of the "Bombay" blood group in stock across the whole world - the fist was identified in India.

The procedure for growing the blood is as follows. They start with a normal donation of one pint of blood. Magnetic beads are utilised to gather flexible stem cells that are capable of becoming a red blood cell. These stem cells grow in large numbers in the labs and are then guided to become red blood cells. The process lasts around three weeks and an initial pool of approximately half a million stem cells results in 50 billion red blood cells. These are then filtered to leave around 15 billion red blood cells that are at the correct stage for development into a transplant.

The first two people have volunteered to take part in the trial, which will aim to test the blood in at least ten healthy volunteers. Two donations of 5-10 mls will be given - one of normal blood and one of lab-grown blood. Scientists hope that the blood will be more potent than normal. Researchers also believe that the lab-grown blood would allow both smaller and less frequent donations in the future. This is because a normal blood donation contains a mixture of young and old red blood-cells, whereas the lab-grown blood is all freshly made and so should last the full 120 days before needing to be replaced.

The disadvantages of this method of blood growth is that there are considerable financial and technological challenges. The average blood donation costs the NHS around £130. Another major challenge is that the harvested stem cells will eventually exhaust themselves. This limits the amount of blood that can be grown. It will take more research to produce the volumes that would be needed clinically.