First-Ever Artificial Blood Transfusion

A French doctor has completed the first-ever artificial blood transfusion after extracting stem cells from a patient's bone marrow, which were then used to grow the red blood cells under laboratory settings. "After five days, 94 to 100 percent of the blood cells remained circulating in the body. After 26 days, 41 to 63 percent remained, which is a normal survival rate for naturally produced blood cells." The cells carried oxygen throughout the patient's body, just as normal red blood cells would.

Artificial blood may become a common reality, thanks to the first successful transfusion of lab-grown blood into a human. Luc Douay, of Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, extracted hematopoietic stem cells from a volunteer's bone marrow, and encouraged these cells to grow into red blood cells with a cocktail of growth factors. Douay's team labeled these cultured cells for tracing, and injected 10 billion of them (equalling 2 milliliters of blood) back into the marrow donor's body.

The successful transfusion is a hugely important step in finding a solution to blood shortages, used everywhere from accident scenes to surgeries to battlefields. "The results show promise that an unlimited blood reserve is within reach," says Luc Douay, of Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris. Mass produced artificial blood, however, remains a distant prospect as only a small amount of blood was transfused in the experiment. To complete a real-life transfusion, 200 times the amount of blood used by Douay would be necessary.

Other attempts to synthesize blood have focused on creating an artificial blood substitute, rather than growing natural blood with artificial means. For example, Chris Cooper of the University of Essex in Colchester, UK, is working on a hemoglobin-based blood substitute that is less toxic than the protein in its unbound state. Artificial blood substitutes present a solution for transfusions after natural disasters and in remote areas. The artificial substitutes do not require refrigeration, unlike fresh and stem cell-grown blood.

The stem cell method has its own pros, though. "The advantage of stem cell technology is that the product will much more closely resemble a red cell transfusion, alleviating some of the safety concerns that continue around the use of the current generations of artificial products," says Cooper.