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Lab-grown blood given to people in world-first clinical trial
- nathias 4y agoget ready for "I drain my blood and replace it with synthetic every morning to increase coding efficiency" hn posts in a year or two ...
- clintonb 4y agoI wonder how long it will take for the technology to reach the point where it’s used for performance enhancement in sports. For example, if these red blood cells can hold a bit more oxygen, that’s an advantage for an endurance athlete.
- Gatsky 4y agoAthletes already do this - they collect their own blood and store it and then transfuse themselves to supranormal levels prior to their sporting event. Lance Armstrong did this. Lab grown blood would make this a bit more convenient, albeit at astronomical cost.
- fbdab103 4y agoI assumed the reason to use their own blood was to avoid detection. Presumably synthetic blood is weird enough that it becomes trivial to detect its presence that would make it a no-go for cheating.
- blackoil 4y agoTill you start modifying the body to produce these supercells.
- akiselev 4y ago“Synthetic” in this case doesn’t mean that it’s made using an alternative chemical process - it just means they’re not made in bone marrow. This process filters out stem cells from a blood donation and prevents them from becoming red blood cells long enough to multiply them significantly.
- Gatsky 4y agoYes. Some of the proteins in the cells would be different to the host cells, due to the exogenous stem cell source. This might be detectable with mass spectrometry (protein sequencing is otherwise difficult and laborious). There might also be different post translational modifications on the lab cells.
- clintonb 4y agoTrue. I imagine a scenario where the athlete is given supranormal blood without the extra step of collecting from themselves. This is just me speaking “out loud”. Today, this would be quite expensive. I can see a future where the technology scales and the richer teams/individuals try this out.
- ip26 4y agoThe salient point is it's prohibited in sports where it gives you a boost, and there are already ways to do it today.
- ChrisKnott 4y agoNowadays they just take EPO
- casefields 4y agoLance Armstrong was busted for blood doping. The cutting edge is way beyond that.
- solatic 4y agoObviously if this succeeds, then the life-saving implications are tremendous. It would become practical to keep a stock of lab-grown blood in ambulances, as it can just be rotated out when it expires, but the immediate availability of blood in the field can mean the difference between life and death. I just hope that blood donation doesn't go away as a result. There are both ethical and personal benefits - ethical, because it's a visceral experience of doing something good for society that most people can do, and with little effort; personal, because of potential health benefits from donating blood, see e.g. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2790905 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... .
- senkora 4y agoI don’t think this is the right way to think about it. If donating blood is no longer a useful societal good, then there are no ethical benefits. If there are health benefits to bloodletting, then we can do that independently of donating the blood.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y agoAnd are those substances filtered out before being used? Could a recipient end up with higher concentrations in their blood?
- wongarsu 4y agoBlood transfusion comes with a bunch of health risks. When it is done you generally have bigger problems than some PFAS accumulation.
- armchairhacker 4y agoalso financial: some people rely on blood donations for extra cash to pay for food and bills. Though, there are better ways to give people opportunities…
- AkshatJ27 4y ago
- pcurve 4y ago"some groups were "really, really rare" and there "might only be 10 people in the country" able to donate." oooof.... I knew some blood type was rare, but this is another level.
- d4mi3n 4y agoWhat’s more is that the identities of those people need to be protected lest they be bombarded constantly for lab studies or requests for life saving donations. Many counties have laws about paying for blood donations and don’t allow donors to be compensated in any way, so they either need to take on the financial burden of flying to wherever their blood is needed or refusing to take on the financial burden and knowingly allowing someone to die. It’s not fair to them and while most of these laws prevent darker forms of abuse of vulnerable demographics, they don’t really account for cases like donation of rare blood types.
- tait 4y ago> so they either need to take on the financial burden of flying to wherever their blood is needed or refusing to take on the financial burden and knowingly allowing someone to die. Is that a real case or hypothetical? If real, I would like to explore further as it does seem rather inappropriate. In my experience, the blood can be drawn locally and then sent to the recipient. That's also true for bone marrow & peripheral blood stem cell donations. Source: I am a transfusion medicine physician.
- beambot 4y agoAlways reminds me of this: > Harrison, known as the “Man With the Golden Arm,” has donated blood nearly every week for 60 years. After all those donations, the 81-year-old Australian man “retired” Friday. The occasion marked the end of a monumental chapter. According to the Australian Red Cross Blood Service, he has helped saved the lives of more than 2.4 million Australian babies. https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/11/health/james-harrison-blood-donor-retires-trnd https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/11/health/james-harrison-blood-d...
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- tomcam 4y agoPretty neat. They take a pint of blood, separate out the stem cells, “guide” aka convert them (not explained, but I think it can be done with gene therapy and complicated physical/chemical treatment) to become red blood cells, and culture those red cells in vats. World-changing if it works.
- inglor_cz 4y agoThe price tag is important. So far, these therapies are expensive. If, in the future, the stem cells can be nudged into their work more cheaply, the effect will be world-changing indeed.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y agoimagine falling into one of those vats, https://ibb.co/zhH2QYX https://ibb.co/zhH2QYX this feeling is more like it
- tomcam 4y agoWe dodged a bullet! They’re pretty small vats right now. Whew.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago"vats" are supposed to mean big vessels. tumblers, glasses, dishes and trays "mean small", just small nitpickings
- tomcam 4y agoA vat could be 30 gallons and still not be enough to fall into
- dotancohen 4y agoLove isn't even a few grams, but you could still fall in love.
- godmode2019 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoApparently it's still derived from blood, just they can grow more to "stretch" it, so vampires can survive with less blood from the peasants. :)
- dang 4y agoPlease don't do this here.
- chatterhead 4y ago
- boxed 4y ago> The bulk of blood transfusions will always rely on people regularly rolling up their sleeve to donate. I always cringe when I read sentences like that. "Always"? Really? How could you possibly know that?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- harry8 4y ago...seems likely to always rely on... Poor expression. (May be completely wrong too for all I know, but I think it's the expression that is rubbing you up the wrong way).
- cultofmetatron 4y agoand 4kb of ram is all you'll ever need!
- habitue 4y ago> The bulk of blood transfusions will always rely on people regularly rolling up their sleeve to donate. Who is this line for? It's comically certain about this
- _tom_ 4y agoPeople literally ALWAYS say this when a new disruptive technology comes up. I'm not sure why, maybe people like the idea of stability? "Digital will never replace film" "Landlines will always be the majority of calls" "Computers are cool, but will never replace typewriters"
- habitue 4y agoI would much prefer: "Hey, your shit's about to get fucked up. Here's what's going to happen:"
- bdg 4y agoBlood is highly complicated. I think the HN audience understands it at a level of "blood is red cells, white cells, and platelets", but that's really not the whole picture. Blood also has plasma which is composed of gas, nutrients, proteins, ions, and water. We can actually refine blood plasma down to a state where it's basically 100% safe even if someone with "bad blood" donated it. These 4 different blood components all get seperated at the lab, frozen for storage, and turned into individual products which can be mixed+matched depending on medical need. Don't get me wrong, growing red cells in a lab is awesome, but I don't see it the same way a lot of comments in this thread do (solving a storage issue, saving a lot of lives, etc). I think the realistic applications of lab-grown-blood over the next 15 years will be closer to treating rare diseases or possibly rare blood types (some people exist outside the typical A, B, AB, O groupings). I don't see this fixing logistics or supply/demand issues in the next 15 years, especially with how highly regulated the blood supply is in any first world nation.
- cookieswumchorr 4y agothe application i immediately thought about is disaster medicine. This is when you need huge amounts of blood, and my guess is that it can be less perfect, when there is simply no other choice to save lives. An inferior substitute is better than nothing
- 6stringmerc 4y agoYeah field work sounds great for this! Stabilize then treat. Good observation.
- est31 4y agoWhat about coagulation? It is needed in situations where you have acute blood loss, and plasma contains the coagulation factors. You already probably want to give your patient coagulants in such a situation but I don't know if those are enough on their own or they need cooperation from existing factors in the plasma.
- kibwen 4y agoI think it might be the opposite, actually. In a disaster, when you need a sudden surge of supply, you're not going to have time to scale up your production. Even if we had reliable supplies of synthetic blood, I think disasters are always going to call for mass donations from the old-fashioned blood producers.
- Noumenon72 4y agoHow do you make the stem cells produce the certain rare blood type that you need? What distinguishes it?
- nigerianbrince 4y agoThe blood group of the person who donated stem cells.
- steve_mcdougall 4y agoIt's well and truly Morbin' time
- nelox 4y ago
- photochemsyn 4y agoFor more comprehensive report, see: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2022/november/labblood-study.html https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2022/november/labblood-study.... > "The lab-grown blood cells are all fresh, so the trial team expect them to perform better than a similar transfusion of standard donated red cells, which contains cells of varying ages. Additionally, if manufactured cells last longer in the body, patients who regularly need blood may not need transfusions as often. That would reduce iron overload from frequent blood transfusions, which can lead to serious complications." They discuss automating the process, but the costs are still likely to be high as you'd need near-clean-room standards of sterility to avoid contamination problems - although that's also a problem with blood donation. Notably, some countries (incl USA, China) allow people to sell their blood, which tends to draw in poor and desperate people who may be more at risk of having transmissible diseases: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/plasma-donations/555599/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/plasma-... In the long run however, this might become the normal process. Bio-synthetic blood cell production has been talked about for over 20 years, it's cool to see it actually happening. (Synthetic immune system cells are also an interesting possibility, i.e. white blood cells).
- zdragnar 4y agoSomething of a minor nit, but the US does not allow blood donors to be paid, only plasma donors.
- tait 4y agoThat's right, and I have taught that point to trainees. However, there is a subtlety and I am sharing it as penance for having taught incorrectly: The FDA does allows blood donation by paid blood donors. The blood must be labeled as from paid donors, but it is legal. See https://www.statnews.com/2016/01/22/paid-plasma-not-blood/ https://www.statnews.com/2016/01/22/paid-plasma-not-blood/ for example...
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y agoA nice way to undercut my market of "pay me". Although maybe this will set a price floor above 0 for blood.
- kadomony 4y agoIsn't this the plot to the movie Daybreakers? True Blood? Morbin' time?
- thecosas 4y agoWas thinking this too; vampires will soon be free to come "out of the coffin" :-)
- inportb 4y agoThis appears to be a transfusion of mature blood cells derived from donor CD34+ hematopoietic stem cells, and it sounds like they're able to collect usable numbers of stem cells from a regular unit of whole blood... but how? People normally don't have a whole lot of stem cells in the peripheral circulation (if they did, they'd have leukemia). For the purpose of stem cell transplantation, the donor is given medications to mobilize stem cells from the bone marrow before collection. I'm sure they're present in very small numbers in the blood, and perhaps they could be cultured in the lab, but even stem cells become exhausted eventually. This is the innovation, probably.
- tait 4y agoThe number of circulating CD34+ cells varies by individual, and by age. I volunteered for an unstimulated collection when we were validating the process of stem cell collection at my work. I was at the upper limit of normal, but I technically had enough in CD34+ cells in my circulation to do a transplant even without stimulation, and I was in my early 30s at the time. A single CD34+ cell can probably make a lot of RBCs. (Ok, to be pedantic, I'm not 100 percent sure they are really CD34+ cells, I was taught that CD34+ is a marker for myeloblasts, and the cell population you would probably want are the CD34- hematogones as they are self-replenishing. The article didn't seem to say either way).
- nottorp 4y agoI wonder if it's white...
- _tom_ 4y agoIf we can grow it with whatever factor James Harrison had, that would be another huge benefit. https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/11/health/james-harrison-blood-donor-retires-trnd https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/11/health/james-harrison-blood-d...
- eloff 4y agoWow, what a legacy that man left behind. I don't trust the numbers in the article, but even if his impact was a fraction of the 2.4M lives saved, he's had a remarkable impact in Australia. Thanks for sharing!
- olddustytrail 4y ago> It is hoped the lab-grown blood will be more potent than normal. Interesting. I've been expecting artificial blood for a while but hadn't considered this angle. Athletes and the wealthy with better performance blood!
- imwillofficial 4y agoYou want 28 days later? Because this is how you get 28 days later.