For the First Time Lab Grown Blood Transfused in Patient

The dependance on donor blood used for all kinds of medical purpose may be decreased now finally thanks to RED blood cells generated in a lab that have been successfully injected into a human volunteer for the first time. Luc Douay, of Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, extracted hematopoietic stem cells from a volunteer's bone marrow, and encouraged these cells to grow into red blood cells with a cocktail of growth factors. Douay's team labeled these cultured cells for tracing, and injected 10 billion of them (equalling 2 milliliters of blood) back into the marrow donor's body.

After five days, 94 to 100 per cent of the cells remained in circulation, while after 26 days, 41 to 63 per cent remained - a survival rate comparable to normal red blood cells. The cultured blood cells also gave every indication of being safe to use: they didn't transform into a malignant cell type, for example. Instead, they behaved like normal red blood cells, binding to oxygen and releasing it

This is great news for international health care. "The results show promise that an unlimited blood reserve is within reach," says Douay. The world is in dire need of a blood reserve, even with the rising donor numbers in the developed world. This need is even higher in parts of the world with high HIV infection rates, which have even lower reserves of donor-worthy blood.

Previously a type of synthetic blood was used to save a life but that was derived from cow's blood. The advantage it has that it doesn't require matching and can be stored without refrigeration for upto three years.

The stem cell method has its own pros, though. "The advantage of stem cell technology is that the product will much more closely resemble a red cell transfusion, alleviating some of the safety concerns that continue around the use of the current generations of artificial products," says Cooper.

Douay's next challenge is to scale up production to a point where the cultured blood cells can be made quickly and cheaply in sufficient quantities for blood transfusions. The 10 billion cells his team made wouldn't go very far - a transfusion typically requires 200 times that number. With his existing technology, Douay estimates that a single transfusion would require 400 litres of culture fluid, which is clearly impractical. "We are still a long way from the vision of dropping a couple of stem cells into the broth and making endless units of blood," says John Hess of the University of Maryland in Baltimore.

Douay believes that it may take several years to scale up the technology. Another possibility is to use embryonic stem cells instead, as Lanza did in 2008. "We can generate up to 100 billion red blood cells from a single six-well plate of stem cells," Lanza says.

New Sutureless Method for Joining Blood Vessels Developed by Scientists

Infant Blood Vessel Cross Section

For the past couple of decades medicine has advanced considerably with new techniques and methods being developed for nearly all areas of expertise in medicine thus increasing life expectancy. But one of the most commonly used practice of joining severed blood vessels have mostly remained the same way today- with sutures, as it was 100 years ago, when the French surgeon Alexis Carrel won a Nobel Prize for advancing the technique. Now, a team of researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine has developed a sutureless method that appears to be a faster, safer and easier alternative.

In animal studies, a team led by Stanford microsurgeon Geoffrey Gurtner, MD, used a poloxamer gel and bioadhesive rather than a needle and thread to join together blood vessels, a procedure called "vascular anastomosis". 

The problem with sutures as explained by Gurtner is that they are difficult to use on blood vessels less than 1 millimeter wide, which he faced when attempting to reattach the digit of a 10 month old infant in 2002

"We struggled with reattaching the digit because the blood vessels were so small — maybe half a millimeter. The surgery took more than five hours, and at the end we were only able to get in three sutures." told Gurtner "Everything turned out OK in that case," he continued. "But what struck me was how the whole paradigm of sewing with a needle and thread kind of falls apart at that level of smallness."

Sutures can lead to complications, such as intimal hyperplasia, in which cells respond to the trauma of the needle and thread by proliferating on the inside wall of the blood vessel, causing it to narrow at that point. Thus increasing the likely hood of production of blood clot which then may cause obstruction of blood flow. Sutures can also trigger an immune response causing inflammation and thus increased chances of a blockage.

So shortly after arriving at Stanford in 2005, Gurtner approached fellow faculty member Gerald Fuller, PhD, professor of chemical engineering and the Fletcher Jones II Professor in the School of Engineering, about whether they knew of a substance that could be turned easily from a liquid to a solid and back to a liquid again, and that would also be safe to use in vascular surgery. Fuller immediately suggested a FDA approved thermoreversible poloxamer called Poloxamer 407.

Fuller teamed up with Jayakumar Rajadas, PhD, director of the Stanford Biomaterials and Advanced Drug Delivery Laboratory, to modify the poloxamer so that it would become solid and elastic when heated above body temperature but dissolve harmlessly into the bloodstream when cooled. The poloxamer then was used to distend both openings of a severed blood vessel, allowing researchers to glue them together precisely.

In tests on animals, the technique was found to be five times faster than the traditional hand-sewn method, with considerably less inflammation and scarring after two years. The method even worked on extremely thin vessels only 0.2 mm wide.

Dermabond, a surgical sealant, was used to attach the ends of the blood vessels together.

Although further testing on large animals is required before human trials can begin, they note that all of the components used in the technique are already approved by the FDA.

"This technology has the potential to progress rapidly from the 'bench to bedside,'" they write.

 Souce: Stanford University Medical Center

Revolutionary 'blood' HBOC-201 saves Tamara Coakley

A REVOLUTIONARY synthetic blood - straight out of science fiction - has saved the life of a Victorian woman.

Doctors at The Alfred brought Tamara Coakley, 33, back from the brink of death after a horrific car crash left her with severe blood loss and dangerously close to heart failure.

This was the first reported case of the synthetic blood reversing cardiac hypoxia and anaemia in a trauma patient.

New technique for regenerating blood vessels to aid treatment of vascular disease

A new technique for regenerating blood vessels has implications for victims of coronary artery disease

Researchers at the University of Western Ontario have discovered a new strategy for helping the body make blood vessels in vulnerable or damaged tissue. The approach, which has implications for the treatment of victims of coronary artery disease, involves the use of a protein named fibroblast growth factor 9 (FGF9) to assist the "supporting" cells of new blood vessels as they are formed by the body.

BLOOD: Improving Crime Scene Analysis Forensic Techniques

Lauren Burke/Getty Images

The aftermath of violent crimes is nothing like what we see on TV, says Stephen Morgan, a forensic analytic chemist. “Crime scenes are messy, chaotic. There’s a lot to look at.” Too much, in fact. What’s needed are methods to simplify the forensic process without damaging evidence at the scene. These three breakthroughs will do just that.

Where

Investigators use spray-on reagents to locate blood spatter that’s too small to see. But chemicals can contaminate evidence or give false positives. Stephen Morgan and Michael Myrick of the University of South Carolina have developed an infrared camera system that exposes microscopic traces of blood without using chemicals. The device targets blood proteins, which remain long after visible blood has been wiped away, filtering background infrared to reveal blood residue that can’t be seen with the naked eye.

How

Detectives use spatter reconstructions to piece together what a crime might have looked like as it happened. Typically, investigators pin string from blood stains to a possible point of origin, but this method overlooks the fact that blood drops arc through the air. Forensic-surveying engineer Ursula Buck and her team at the University of Bern in Switzerland use laser scanners and imaging software to re-create accurate spatter trajectories. First, digital photographs of the crime scene are stitched into a panorama that shows blood-stain size and location, while the laser scanner creates a 3-D rendering of the room. The mass of each droplet is then calculated based on the size of the stain. Finally, using an algorithm developed by the Swiss team, every drop of blood has its path re-created, no string attached.

Who

Forensic scientists had no reliable method for establishing age using blood samples before last November, when Manfred Kayser and his colleagues at Erasmus MC University Medical Center Rotterdam in the Netherlands announced that they had developed a process to determine age, plus or minus nine years. The test examines white blood cells called T cells by looking for the snippets of DNA that form inside newly made T cells as they fight infections. As we age, our bodies create fewer T cells (a reason the elderly are more susceptible to colds). The more of these DNA snippets, the younger the perp. “Police are desperate to get information,” Kayser says. “We’re mining human biology to give them a new tool.”

Source: Popsci

Polymer Cloak Gives Blood Cells Anonymity, Possibly Allowing Universal Transfusions

Anyone who has ever donated blood has learned his or her blood type, such as AB, O negative, etc., which will be matched to a recipient with the same blood type. If blood types do not match, a recipient’s immune system could reject the transfusion, a potentially fatal proposition. But a new method masks the type of donated red blood cells, possibly eliminating the need to test types and making it easier to give and receive blood.
There are eight common blood types, based on four major groups, which classify red blood cells based on antigens that are found on the cells’ surface. Foreign antigens can trigger a serious immune response. Type A has only the A antigen, Type B has the B antigen, and so on.


People with type O blood are considered universal donors, because they have neither A nor B antigens on their red cells, so a recipient’s body would be less likely to reject the blood.

The new method masks the antigens so there would be no immune response. It involves cloaking individual blood cells inside polymer shells, which hide the cells’ identity from the immune system. But oxygen can still penetrate the shell, allowing the cell to do its job.

Scientists have long tried to create an all-purpose red blood cell, one that doesn’t rely on typing tests or the kindness of donors with just the right type. Other efforts have involved polymers that canbehave like blood, and DARPA has been funding research into blood pharming, which involves genetically engineering an organism to produce large quantities of synthetic blood.

Turning blood banks into universal stockpiles could be another solution. The study appears in the journal Biomacromolecules. Source:Popsci