The New Yorker has published an article titled “The Long Quest for Artificial Blood” that explores the potential of artificial blood or blood substitutes. The story delves into the history of blood transfusions, the potential of artificial blood, and describes current research efforts to develop alternative products or blood substitutes to donated blood. The article references a clinical trial (called RESTORE) of “lab-grown red blood cells” being transfused into humans that is being funded by NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT), the national blood provider for England and transplant services for the United Kingdom (UK). According to a NHSBT news release, the RESTORE trial, “is a first in human randomi[z]ed controlled trial in healthy volunteers to assess whether red blood cells that have been grown in the laboratory last longer in the circulation after transfusion and are safe.”
The piece on the potential of artificial blood and blood substitutes also mentions the work of, “Allan Doctor, MD the director of the Center for Blood Oxygen Transport and Hemostasis, at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and the co-inventor of ErythroMer, a synthetic nanoparticle that mimics the oxygen-carrying role of red blood cells [who is leading an initiative to create] an artificial substitute that bleeds — or at least operates in the body — almost exactly like the real thing.”
In July 2024, reporters in Science featured his work in another story on the potential of artificial blood while examining hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers (HBOCs), their history, and their potential promise as a blood substitute. Some HBOCs have previously encountered issues such as vasoconstriction as published in a meta-analysis in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). To combat these concerns, the researchers have begun enveloping their hemoglobin-based products or blood substitutes, “in an artificial membrane designed to mimic how a red blood cell controls the capture and release of oxygen.” Dr. Doctor explained to Science in their article on the potential of artificial blood and blood substitutes that, “[w]e’ve imitated the mechanism in normal red cells for optimizing oxygen transport from lungs to tissue…The principal idea is not to interfere with the signaling between red blood cells and blood vessels.” In January 2023, “the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded a $46 million grant to a University of Maryland (UMD)-led consortium to develop, “a field-deployable, shelf-stable whole blood equivalent [with ErythroMer as its core] that can be used to resuscitate trauma patients when donated blood products are not available.”
The New Yorker article on blood substitutes and the potential of artificial blood also addresses the challenges of blood shortages and an aging donor pool, while describing that, “although there is now evidence to show that giving whole, never-separated blood is more effective than red blood cells alone — or even recombined red cells, plasma, and platelets — blood banks on both sides of the Atlantic continue to break blood down into its components.” Col. (Ret.) John B. Holcomb, MD, FACS stated to The New Yorker that, “[t]he problem here is that there’s practically no reimbursement for prehospital blood by insurance and agencies. There’s nothing that has a bigger impact on survival than prehospital blood. Nothing. And yet the major impediment is not logistics — we’ve worked through that. It’s not how to store the blood. It’s reimbursement. And, in our system, if you don’t get reimbursed you don’t do it.” Artificial blood could potentially solve these issues in the eyes of its developers.