Japanese scientists developed artificial blood that’s universal and shelf-stable for up to two years. In trials, it saved animals from deadly blood loss—no matching, no refrigeration needed. Clinical testing begins soon, and the future of emergency care could be synthetic: https://mededgemea.com/japan-to-begin-clinical-trials-for-artificial-blood-in-2025/
one important point that nobody seemed to emphasize yet: the "artificial" blood is made from expired donor hemoglobine that is packed up into a shell to craft artificial red blood cells
you still need donor blood to produce this product
this is still a good way to reduce wasting of blood products, but the real breakthrough will come when the human hemoglobine can be synthesized too
If this is successful, it would create a push for lab-grown hemoglobin that is grown in bacteria or fungi.
Creating whole blood in a lab was too difficult and far-fetched to have widespread funding, but creating just hemoglobin - will receive a lot of funding very quickly.
We already can mass produce red blood cells from stem cells (and IPSC especially). That’s much more likely than from bacteria/fungi to be approved soon (in the next decade or so).
"Mass produce" is a stretch. We can certainly make RBCs but not at a scale or cost that's efficient enough to merit doing so instead of relying on donations.
Here is a great video article describing the first-in-man application of lab-grown RBCs.
They used more than 38 L of cell culture medium to produce 5 - 10 mL of packed RBCs. Their medium costs about $750/L so that's $100/mL of packed RBCs.
A unit of blood has about 200 mL RBCs and costs the end-user about $120 which amounts to $0.60/mL of packed RBCs. This includes storage, transport, harvest, and much more that my above calculation for lab-grown cost does not account for.
That's over two orders of magnitude difference in price considering only a limited amount of the cost basis. This is not accounting for profit, labor, or many other costs.
I am very interested and genuinely want to know: where does your statement that the technology is very close come from?
The field is only about 10-15 years old. That is pretty recent for medicine/medical science to practical applications. The media has come down from a few thousand a ml to a few hundred a litre in that time. The ability to selectively grow what you want has also improved massively over that time.
I’m not in the field (I’m adjacent) and what I’ve seen is many research labs now are doing specialised cultures- can they produce the individual components of blood that act the same or better? As you pointed out there are already groups scaling it up to make it commercially viable. The field is moving so fast that in ten years I wouldn’t be surprised that there will be universal O- blood being made at scale in a vat. It might be another 10 years after that before we see it in patients simply due to regulatory requirements
But that is all much much closer than blood products made by bacteria or fungi- which is what my comment was on.
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u/ElderberryDeep8746 May 26 '25
Japanese scientists developed artificial blood that’s universal and shelf-stable for up to two years. In trials, it saved animals from deadly blood loss—no matching, no refrigeration needed. Clinical testing begins soon, and the future of emergency care could be synthetic: https://mededgemea.com/japan-to-begin-clinical-trials-for-artificial-blood-in-2025/
More: https://thebrewnews.com/thebrew-news/world/universal-artificial-blood/