Lab-grown human blood may reduce donor dependency

A team planning on trialling lab grown blood in humans by 2016 has just received 5m in funding from the Wellcome Trust. Its ultimate goal? To move the world from a donor dependant system, to a manufactured alternative.

The money has been awarded to a consortium of scientists working on transforming pluripotent stem cells into red blood cells at the University of Glasgow, the University of Edinburgh, NHS Blood and Transplant and more, under the direction of the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service (SNBTS). The team has been working on the project for six years now, mainly supported by funding from the Wellcome Trust. It has gone from delivering a proof of principle, to generating 5ml of blood in the lab with great efficiency.

"Now, 90 percent of the stem cells turn into red blood cells," Joanne Mountford, from the University of Glasgow's Institute of Cardiovascular and Medical Sciences, told Wired.co.uk. "Before, it was five percent."

Mountford explains that the dramatic acceleration was partly down to the team "being clever" about mimicking the natural maturation processes that would go on inside the body, and replicating the right combination of chemical signals to induce that cell growth.

"At the beginning, for every one stem cell we would get one red cell -- now we get 250,000 for every one. Optimisation and clarification, has brought us a long way."

This progress is essential, considering the vast leap that will be needed to transform the blood delivery system. In the UK alone, we transfuse 2.5 million units of blood each year. Put that in the context of how many red cells make up a single unit of blood -- between one and two trillion -- and scaling up seems a mind-boggling pursuit.

The SNBTS team is determined, though. Already it can make about one to ten percent of a unit in 30 days, around 5ml, and this is the amount that will be needed for a human trial in 2016.

There is still a lot to overcome before they get there, though.

The team has been perfecting its technique for removing the cell nucleus, for instance.

"We have to mature the cells in a culture to the stage where they eject the nucleus -- we're working on that, particularly changing the chemical signals in the last steps."

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Lab-grown human blood may reduce donor dependency