Japanese scientists develop artificial blood compatible with all blood types

One more anecdote. WADA, the World Anti Doping Agency, had to specifically address using hemoglobin based blood substitutes for doping.

https://www.wada-ama.org/en/resources/scientific-research/de...

This class of products is room temperatures stable, and typeless, and it increases oxygen carrying capacity basically immediately. You can imagine how useful that would be for something like a Tour De France team. Keep a half dozen units of fake blood in your team bus. No special equipment. No rigorous temp control. You can give any unit to any one of your athletes without worrying about compatibility. You can administer it on race day, eliminating any chance of being caught in the runup to your event.

Obviously Biopure condemned off-label use of their product for blood doping, but behind closed doors they were super proud that it was seen as effective enough to be called out by name by WADA. No publicity is bad publicity and all that.

What happens to the IP when this happens? If the product works but wasn't supported by the right company how does it not get picked up by someone more competent?

I fondly remember trying to angel invest in BioPure, thank you for the flashback!

They just pumped like straight hemoglobin in the blood and it worked? No antibody response? They didn’t just like fall apart? Creative. I like it.

How well did that one work?

There was another one in the US called "PolyHeme" which did not go well - https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=PolyHeme

The controversy around that one was not only that it did not work as well as it could (more patients had heart attacks than with saline), but that it was trialled on trauma patients without their explicit consent - implied consent was used, and people in trial areas could opt-out by requesting a bracelet. Problematic to say the least...

Apparently their first target is soon-to-expire donor blood erythrocytes — which makes this essentially a (pretty major) scalability improvement in how far existing donor blood goes.

However, that being said: hemoglobin’s just a protein. Recombinant hemoglobin isn’t overly challenging to produce — we do it already. (Currently mostly animal hemoglobin, for vegan meat — but it’s no different to produce human hemoglobin.) We don’t bother with synthesizing human hemoglobin because there’s (until now) no way to go from having a protein to having useful cells serving an erythrocytic function. This research changes that — and so will strongly motivate demand for such production. I would bet money that, 5–10 years out, you’ll be able to buy bags — even drums — of recombinant human hemoglobin from any biopharma supplier.

My understanding is a huge issue with blood donation is expiry, and therefore the need for consistent year-round donation - when a disaster occurs there's often a spike in donations but the surplus gets thrown away. A mechanism that can make use of expired blood that works for all blood types and extends the shelf life seems extremely valuable.

“No need for compatibility testing” – I think that’s a really important feature. Not everyone can accept all types of blood. It becomes a real challenge when a person requires constant transfusions and can only accept one specific blood type.

Seems as if the long shelf life vs 42 days for human blood is the biggest advantage. You can use blood about to expire to make this, and it will last 2-5 years more

You can see my top-level comment for more context, but I've seen other products in this space called "oxygen therapeutics" for exactly this reason. They're not really blood, they're an oxygen delivery system. It seemed like a pedantic distinction when I first heard the term, but I think you make some good points about why the distinction is meaningful.

I think most transfusions after blood loss are also only red blood cells, so all these other functions are not transferred.

In your link they have only done tests on rabbits.

In this post they have already done some tests on humans and are now increasing the dosage since March.

> Small-scale studies began in 2022. Three groups of four healthy male volunteers aged 20 to 50 received a single intravenous injection of hemoglobin vesicles — artificial oxygen carriers that mimic the structure of red blood cells — in increasing amounts, up to 100 milliliters. While some participants experienced mild side effects, there were no significant changes in vital signs, including blood pressure. Building on that success, Sakai announced that his team was accelerating the process last July. In March, it started administering between 100 and 400 milliliters of the artificial blood cell solution to volunteers.

> If no side effects are confirmed, the trial will shift to examining the treatment’s efficacy and safety. It aims to put the artificial red blood cells into practical use by around 2030.

"PFC solutions can carry oxygen so well that mammals, including humans, can survive breathing liquid PFC solution, called liquid breathing."

Explaining the joke: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/30/why-blood-makes-up-over-2poi...

That said, I'm sure I recently saw some blog-post about how the 2-2.5% amounts are significantly overblown because that's counting export-categories of products can sometimes contain human blood derivatives as an ingredient, rather than straight-up RBCs/plasma.

Hmmm, nothing yet on a quick Google search, but that doesn't mean as much these days...

I'm okay with that

I used to be a Jehovah's witness when I was younger and I gotta say there sure were a lot of accounts of kids dying because their parents and the jws didn't want blood. Sure they got praised for their steadfastness after the fact but I often wonder how many would still be alive. Not to say blood transfusions are perfect or never cause problems but I mean come on.