Blood cells made in a lab have been infused into people
The result will be a boon for patients with rare blood types
Until the 1940s, blood transfusions often went wrong because some of the main blood-group systems, such as the Rhesus factor, had yet to be discovered. This hit or miss approach to matching donors with recipients is now a thing of the past, as tests for all sorts of characteristics of an individual’s blood have become available. But finding a well-matched donor can still be difficult. Some patients have blood types so rare that there may be but a handful of appropriate donors in the country where they live.
On November 7th a consortium of researchers at several British institutions, co-ordinated by NHS Blood and Transplant, a government health authority, and Bristol University, announced a step towards solving this problem. They have successfully transfused into two healthy volunteers red blood cells grown from appropriate stem cells donated by others.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline "Blood not so simple"
More from Science & technology
Many mental-health conditions have bodily triggers
Psychiatrists are at long last starting to connect the dots
Climate change is slowing Earth’s rotation
This simplifies things for the world’s timekeepers
Memorable images make time pass more slowly
The effect could give our brains longer to process information