Artificial blood made from human stem cells could plug the donations hole

"It's a tiny wee finger prick test," says senior nurse Patsy Scouse to calm the nervous first-time donor having his hemoglobin levels tested at a blood donation centre in Edinburgh.

The Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service receives donations from about four percent of the UK's population. Currently, stocks are stable, although the service is always trying to recruit new donors.

The collection may take place in a clinical environment, the nurse says, but the clinic "wants this experience, especially for first-time donors, to be really positive so they can go out and feel they've done a really good thing."

But the service is also working on potential new technologies to secure blood supplies in the future, including "artificial blood."

Mass-produced and clean

Mark Turner, medical director of the Blood Transfusion Service, is looking into how blood could be synthesized in the future.

"We've known for some time that it's possible to produce red blood cells from so called adult stem cells, but you can't produce large amounts of blood in that way because of the restrictive capacity of those cells to proliferate," he explains. What scientists can do, he adds, is to derive pluripotent stem cells - stem cell lines - either from embryos or from adult tissue.

These cells are processed in the laboratory to produce larger numbers of cells, Turner told DW.

"It may be possible in due course to manufacture blood on a very large scale, but we're a very long way from that at the present time," he says. "At the moment, our focus is on trying to achieve production of red blood cells which are of the right kind of quality and safety, that they would be fit for human trials."

From the lab to clinical trials

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Artificial blood made from human stem cells could plug the donations hole