Japanese scientists develop artificial blood compatible with all blood types
tokyoweekender.com
tokyoweekender.com
The fact that they weren't using whole red blood cells meant the product was typeless, room temp stable, and better at perfusing around arterial blockages and into tissue since the molecules were so small.
Unfortunately, the company was kind of a mess. They managed to get licensed for sale in South Africa, and in the US for the veterinary product, but never managed FDA approval. It's a shame. Everyone could see the promise of the product, and it really actually worked, but they just couldn't seem to make the business viable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopure
Edit: When I say they imploded, I really mean it. They got prosecuted for misleading statements to investors about the state of US clinical trials, and the legal proceedings became farcical.
"On March 11, 2009 [Senior VP] Howard Richman pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court and admitted he had instructed his lawyers to tell a judge he was gravely ill with colon cancer. He also admitted to posing as his doctor in a phone call with his lawyer so that she would tell the judge that his cancer had spread and that he was undergoing chemotherapy."
That guys was sentenced to 3 years in prison. Here's hoping this new blood substitute has a happier outcome!
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.
Probably the most well known is animated GIFs, which had some popularity in early web pages, but quickly died off, then had a huge upsurge after the patent expired in the 2000's, when anyone could add animated GIF outputs to any program or web service, without licensing.
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...
The artificial blood is created by extracting hemoglobin — a protein containing iron that facilitates the transportation of oxygen in red blood cells — from expired donor blood. It is then encased in a protective shell to create stable, virus-free artificial red blood cells. As these artificial cells have no blood type, there is no need for compatibility testing.
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.
Nope. They're making _plant_ hemoglobin ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leghemoglobin ) to stay vegan.
Yes, I was also surprised that freaking plants have hemoglobin. But apparently, legume plants use it to create the oxygen-depleted environment for nitrogen fixing bacteria to work.
There's a strong parallel here how pro-life activists view the use of human stem cells.
And the pro-life activists certainly have a similar argument. They're also welcome to holding it, as long as they don't impose it on others.
But as long as they themselves just stay away from stem-cells derived products, then it's their own personal choice. I also have no problems with, for example, Jehovah Witnesses that refuse blood-derived products.
If they have an ethics code, they are welcome to follow it, as long as they don't try to impose it on others.
In this particular case, accommodating even a maximalistic vegan position was not a big deal (just use hemoglobin from plants), so why not do it?
I wonder if the recently dead qualify.
Would cavader blood still be viable, harvested an hour post death?
There's definitely a need for a safe, shelf stable blood substitute.
Though, I'd argue that this isn't artificial blood, it's artificially replacing only the oxygen carrying role of blood -- there's nothing in this product that is producing clotting, fighting disease, managing hormones, fueling cells, etc. Still, excited to see this progress, transfusions are still a risky bet, and having something that can provide at least the O2 capacity in a safer package is very welcome.
So what's different this time?
(Upon further examination, the 2019 team at the National Defense Medical College also had Dr Hiromi Sakai. So why is this news now?)
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.
more on what I assume is their hemoglobin prep process: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30715862/
and if you want to make your own liposomes, instructions here https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8234105/
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...
OK, I guess we'll wait and see about the vampires. But the blood substitute and Japanese scientists thing was spot-on, at least.
Tested in 12 people, once. Hmm...
"The artificial blood is created by extracting hemoglobin — a protein containing iron that facilitates the transportation of oxygen in red blood cells — from donor blood"
So needs blood as a raw material.
- "in increasing amounts, up to 100 milliliters."
They went through a process of increasing the dosage and monitoring the subjects.
All they know right now is that humans can tolerate their blood product. They have no idea if it actually helps. And testing that is going to be an ethical mess.
We've already been through this! PolyHeme was developed for decades, went into trials in 2009, and was a disaster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PolyHeme
Testing PolyHeme was a landmark in research ethics in the US. Obviously not in a good way. The problem is that you can only test these things in people who are very sick and then you hope that you aren't killing them. That's sketchy at best.
PolyHeme went a step further and tested on people without their consent in secret. https://www.annemergmed.com/article/S0196-0644(06)02263-3/fu...
They probably killed a dozen people or so. Lets hope this has a better outcome.