Coming soon: Mass blood production

[Jaepheth]

Artificial blood 'will be manufactured in factories'
Wellcome Trust-funded stem cell research has produced red blood cells fit for transfusion into humans, paving the way for the mass production of blood

By Tanjil Rashid

It is the stuff of gothic science fiction: men in white coats in factories of blood and bones.

But the production of blood on an industrial scale could become a reality once a trial is conducted in which artificial blood made from human stem cells is tested in patients for the first time.

It is the latest breakthrough in scientists’ efforts to re-engineer the body, which have already resulted in the likes of 3d-printed bones and bionic limbs.

Marc Turner, the principal researcher in the £5 million programme funded by the Wellcome Trust, told The Telegraph that his team had made red blood cells fit for clinical transfusion.

Prof Turner has devised a technique to culture red blood cells from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells – cells that have been taken from humans and ‘rewound’ into stem cells. Biochemical conditions similar to those in the human body are then recreated to induce the iPS cells to mature into red blood cells – of the rare universal blood type O.
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“Although similar research has been conducted elsewhere, this is the first time anybody has manufactured blood to the appropriate quality and safety standards for transfusion into a human being,” said Prof Turner.

There are plans in place for the trial to be concluded by late 2016 or early 2017, he said. It will most likely involve the treatment of three patients with Thalassaemia, a blood disorder requiring regular transfusions. The behaviour of the manufactured blood cells will then be monitored.

“The cells will be safe,” he said, adding that there are processes whereby cells can be removed.

The technique highlights the prospect of a limitless supply of manufactured type-O blood, free of disease and compatible with all patients.

“Although blood banks are well-stocked in the UK and transfusion has been largely safe since the Hepatitis B and HIV infections of the 1970s and 1980s, many parts of the world still have problems with transfusing blood,” said Prof Turner.

However, scaling up the process to meet demand will be a challenge, as Prof Turner’s laboratory conditions are not replicable on an industrial scale. “A single unit of blood contains a trillion red blood cells. There are 2 million units of blood transfused in the UK each year,” he said.

Currently, it costs approximately £120 to transfuse a single unit of blood. If Prof Turner’s technique is scaled up efficiently, it could substantially reduce costs.

Dr Ted Bianco, Director of Technology Transfer at the Wellcome Trust, said: “One should not underestimate the challenge of translating the science into routine procedures for the clinic. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the challenge Professor Turner and colleagues have set out to address, which is to replace the human blood donor as the source of supply for life-saving transfusions."

For the moment, factories of blood remain the stuff of fiction.

Science marches on.

[mr friendly guy]

Great news. However with blood donations we don't just get packed cells (Red blood cells). We also take immunoglobulins, platelets, plasma (with clotting factors) etc from donations. So even if this gets off the ground, we will still need blood donations.

[SCRawl]

Great news. However with blood donations we don't just get packed cells (Red blood cells). We also take immunoglobulins, platelets, plasma (with clotting factors) etc from donations. So even if this gets off the ground, we will still need blood donations.

Sure, but (as you know) these can be harvested much more effectively if the donor can keep their red blood cells. A blood donor can donate platelets or plasma every two weeks, but whole blood only every eight weeks. It also takes more than twice as long, but if whole blood is no longer needed I can still see this becoming more common.

[Darmalus]

Great news. However with blood donations we don't just get packed cells (Red blood cells). We also take immunoglobulins, platelets, plasma (with clotting factors) etc from donations. So even if this gets off the ground, we will still need blood donations.

Since all these things are made by the body as well, wouldn't that just make those the next target on the biological mass production plan, or do they present especially vexing difficulties compared to red blood cells?

[mr friendly guy]

Great news. However with blood donations we don't just get packed cells (Red blood cells). We also take immunoglobulins, platelets, plasma (with clotting factors) etc from donations. So even if this gets off the ground, we will still need blood donations.

Since all these things are made by the body as well, wouldn't that just make those the next target on the biological mass production plan, or do they present especially vexing difficulties compared to red blood cells?

Sure they will be the next step, but considering it took us this long for artificial blood, it might take some time yet for these as well.

[cosmicalstorm]

There has been some success in reversing certain aspects of aging by flooding the body of older mice with blood from younger mice. I wonder if some therapy like that will eventually become possible via this discovery.

[Irbis]

Also, any way of producing cells cheaply will probably be used to make food in some capacity. As additives or even main dish, there are quite a few cultures that do eat blood meals and synthetic, safe blood is going to take some odium off eating them.

[Highlord Laan]

Hm. I wonder how the use of artificial blood would go with those that have fantastical religious objections to standard blood transfusions.

[Iroscato]

Hm. I wonder how the use of artificial blood would go with those that have fantastical religious objections to standard blood transfusions.

On a similiar topic, I asked a couple of my friends who happen to be muslim on their views on eating artificially-grown pork/pig meat. They actually would be comfortable with it, but mentioned it's probably up for interpretation, which I would agree with.

[mr friendly guy]

Hm. I wonder how the use of artificial blood would go with those that have fantastical religious objections to standard blood transfusions.

From my understanding with JWs, as long as its not derived from taking some blood from someone else its ok.

[Darmalus]

Hm. I wonder how the use of artificial blood would go with those that have fantastical religious objections to standard blood transfusions.

On a similiar topic, I asked a couple of my friends who happen to be muslim on their views on eating artificially-grown pork/pig meat. They actually would be comfortable with it, but mentioned it's probably up for interpretation, which I would agree with.

I know several vegetarians who have been vegetarians longer than I have been alive who have stated that they would celebrate practical vat-grown meat with their first (vat) steak dinner in decades. So even if the first commercial vat-burgers are 5x as expensive, they will definitely have an instant market.

[Borgholio]

I think many of the moral and religious objections about meat revolve around either the death of an animal or the filth associated with that animal. For instance, pigs are inherently rather disgusting slobs...which is why Jews and Muslims (among others) are forbidden to eat them. But a vat-grown pork chop which never sleeps in it's own feces...that avoids the problem alltogether. Then as far a vegans and vegetarians go, vat-grown pork or beef did not result in the death of an animal, so that moral stumbling block is removed too.

[Broomstick]

I think many of the moral and religious objections about meat revolve around either the death of an animal or the filth associated with that animal. For instance, pigs are inherently rather disgusting slobs...which is why Jews and Muslims (among others) are forbidden to eat them.

Another couple of factors might be that pigs tend to eat the same sort of food people eat, so unless you have very abundant food supplies they can contribute to human food shortages, and because they don't sweat, or least not very much, keeping them alive in a hot, dry, desert (like much of the middle east) is problematic.

For Jews and Muslims, though, it's not just the living animal that poses problems. Jews have no prohibition on using most pig products for non-food purposes, and for life-saving medical things use of porcine products are almost always OK as saving a life takes precedence over keeping kosher. Vat-grown meat, though, would probably remain non-kosher for eating. Muslims are supposed to avoid not only eating pork, but anything made from a pig. That would likely include vat-grown meat of pig origin.

But a vat-grown pork chop which never sleeps in it's own feces...that avoids the problem alltogether. Then as far a vegans and vegetarians go, vat-grown pork or beef did not result in the death of an animal, so that moral stumbling block is removed too.

That's the contingent currently avoiding pork who is likely to accept vat-grown meat.

[Ralin]

Hm. I wonder how the use of artificial blood would go with those that have fantastical religious objections to standard blood transfusions.

From my understanding with JWs, as long as its not derived from taking some blood from someone else its ok.

Yeah, not that they aren't shitheads but Jehovah's Witnesses are supposed to be pretty big on researching transfusion-free alternatives.

[Broomstick]

Some of those alternatives has supposedly paid off by reducing blood loss and conserving blood stocks for non-JW's, too, so although they can be a pain in the ass I suppose they've done some good in the world.

[Ralin]

Some of those alternatives has supposedly paid off by reducing blood loss and conserving blood stocks for non-JW's, too, so although they can be a pain in the ass I suppose they've done some good in the world.

Indeed. Honestly I'd probably approve of them being nice enough to decrease the number of believers in their crappy religion that way if it weren't for all the minors and less devout family members who get burned in the process.

Come to think of it, I think my cousin's ex-husband comes from a Jehovah's Witness background. Don't think he's practiced it for a long time, but still. Here's hoping that he's not notified if any of her kids need surgery.

[Irbis]

Some of those alternatives has supposedly paid off by reducing blood loss and conserving blood stocks for non-JW's, too, so although they can be a pain in the ass I suppose they've done some good in the world.

I don't know. I had surgery a few years ago in private clinic that adopted their methods (due to public, free healthcare not really catering to personal tastes in medicine) and the operation was considerably more uncomfortable and painful than previous one I had with extra blood supply. I am not qualified to say how much of that was result to reduce blood loss and reuse patient's blood, but it really didn't left me impressed. Making medicine objectively worse to cater to small scale whims really isn't good thing, IMHO.

Then there is the fact that no matter what tiny gains blood replacement search did, it was by far outweighed by all the deaths caused by refusal to accept blood that would soon leave your body anyway

For instance, pigs are inherently rather disgusting slobs... which is why Jews and Muslims (among others) are forbidden to eat them. But a vat-grown pork chop which never sleeps in it's own feces... that avoids the problem alltogether.

No. This is yet another example of pre-medieval voodoo based on wrong observations, twisted into some parody of ritual by stone age shepherds. Not only pigs are very clean animals, they also have similar cleanliness stances as humans and would rather not sleep in dirty place. Alas, ignorant shepherds saw act of desperation (rolling in mud to cool in hot Levant climate) and slapped the moniker of 'dirty' animal on perhaps one of the least deserving it.

Ditto for cleanliness laws, if you squint and look very hard, they did have some minor health and hygiene benefits - for illiterate, unwashed peasants. That was enough to accept long list of bans perverted by whatever next prophet though sounded dirty, and now we have grown up people obsessively scanning their homes with a microscope, less they overlook tiny crumb of bread that will contaminate them forever. Despite simple water, soap, and boiling water being enough to render the whole ban list obsolete

And that is in one of the sanest religions out there, as they (unlike say JW) have provision that voodoo immediately stops to apply when life is threatened.

[SCRawl]

Ditto for cleanliness laws, if you squint and look very hard, they did have some minor health and hygiene benefits - for illiterate, unwashed peasants. That was enough to accept long list of bans perverted by whatever next prophet though sounded dirty, and now we have grown up people obsessively scanning their homes with a microscope, less they overlook tiny crumb of bread that will contaminate them forever. Despite simple water, soap, and boiling water being enough to render the whole ban list obsolete

I'm sure I'm not the first person to suggest this, but this is what I always assumed was the genesis (pun intended) of some of the religious dietary proscriptions. After all, if you don't cook a pig correctly you can make everyone sick. And maybe a few important people back in the Bronze Age had a shellfish allergy, so, boom, no shellfish. This made me wonder why there aren't proscriptions against eating chicken (for reasons similar to those for pork), but some recent Google-fu reveals that ancient Israelites probably didn't eat chicken, and if this is true then there's no reason to forbid something no one was considering trying in the first place.

If this sort of thing is true, then it certainly lets some of the ancient religions off the hook, since they were just looking out for their flocks in the only way they knew how. Ancient proscriptions became traditions, and really, who cares if some demographics deny themselves bacon or lobster? For the more modern religions, though, there really isn't any excuse, so I cut the JWs exactly zero slack for their stance on transfusions.

[Broomstick]

Pigs are not ruminants, like sheep and goats and cattle, they can't live off grass so in some ways they can wind up competing with humans for food. If you're poor shepherds in the Levant then a pig proscription to keep human-edible food for humans and convert grass/shrubs to meat via ruminants might wind up being the genuinely beneficial feature of that taboo, more so than "cleanliness" which was a bit dubious by our standards. Yes, pigs carry parasites, but so does everything else. Yes, pig has to be prepared properly, so does every other sort of meat. Between the food competition and having to keep an animal with deficient sweat glands alive in that environment that's reason enough to forgo pigs.

The proscription on shellfish isn't so much specifically shellfish as forbidding fish unless they have both fins and scales - which in addition to eliminating shrimp also takes catfish off the table. Catfish are bottomfeeders, which in polluted waters can be a serious problem. Shellfish can accumulate toxins, again, a serious problem in polluted waters. Where water is limited it is all too easy for it to become polluted.

Tribes that avoided eating pigs and trayf fish might have had more food for people and less illness, thereby giving them an advantage over pig, shrimp, and catfish eaters - cultural Darwinism, if you like. Some other hygiene related taboos, like not shitting within a certain distance of camp, likewise would improve general health. The Jewish habit of ritual baths, and the requirements for them, would result in bathing in water cleaner than the average settlement sewer river or stream. Does that mean some divine sky god inspired all these rules? No, it may be that Levant tribes with cleanliness rules that provided some advantage out competed those that did not, and the somewhat random nature of acquiring these rules resulted in a lot of nonsense/ineffective rules also being adopted. Not mixing meat and milk might be one of those - I've heard attempts to explain that as avoid contamination from either bad milk or bad meat but honestly, both those types of food can go off pretty quickly on their own, and the Muslims in the same area don't seem to have a problem with mixing the two.

The whole "search for breadcrumbs" thing isn't so much from a concern for cleanliness (though I think it later acquired some of that) as part of the re-enactment/tale of fleeing from Egypt. Jews don't eat unleavened bread for the seder because it's somehow cleaner, they eat it because that's what their ancestors had while fleeing captivity. You remove the breadcrumbs so there's no cheating. The rest of the foods are likewise symbolic of the exodus, not so much a matter of cleanliness.

There certainly are rules about which birds you can and can't eat, and as it happens, chickens are kosher whereas birds of prey are not. Why is that? Damifino. Why are locusts OK but other insects are not?

What it comes down to is that you shouldn't try to hard to justify religious taboos on scientific grounds because it doesn't work. Those taboos that make sense under science are either coincidence, or beneficial enough that people practicing them would likely have better survival rates so the custom would continue and spread by virtue of its followers being less likely to die of a particular cause that is felling their non-observant neighbors. Barring actual proof of a divine entity that's really all the explanation required.

[PainRack]

I don't know. I had surgery a few years ago in private clinic that adopted their methods (due to public, free healthcare not really catering to personal tastes in medicine) and the operation was considerably more uncomfortable and painful than previous one I had with extra blood supply. I am not qualified to say how much of that was result to reduce blood loss and reuse patient's blood, but it really didn't left me impressed. Making medicine objectively worse to cater to small scale whims really isn't good thing, IMHO.

Then there is the fact that no matter what tiny gains blood replacement search did, it was by far outweighed by all the deaths caused by refusal to accept blood that would soon leave your body anyway

Ah.................... Minimizing the amount of blood transfused in surgery is now the gold standard in surgeons, from stuff like cell saver machines, laproscopic techniques that reduce blood loss, not transfusing blood "just in case"...... it saved money, saved time and is generally better than the old techniques.

In general, we do owe a debt to JW for volunteering to be the guinea pigs in a 30 year old natural experiment kinda thing, with them providing a market to help fund devices that now help others.

Given how many people undergo surgery nowadays, while the JW science is bogus, I will say that their funding and guinea pigs kinda helped more people than they harmed.