PITTSBURGH, Pa. (PTTP) – 30,000 people per year in the United States suffer preventable deaths due to traumatic bleeding. The University of Pittsburgh and UPMC announced on Thursday their involvement in a program to bring this number down by producing shelf-stable, artificial, dried whole blood within the next 10 years.
“The use of an artificial, dried whole blood product will dramatically reduce those preventable deaths,” said Dr. Philip C. Spinella, co-director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Trauma and Transfusion Medicine Research Center. “We’ll be able to put this dried product in ambulances, in helicopters, and save people’s lives before they get to the hospital.”
Artificial, dried red blood cells; artificial platelets; and dried plasma have all been developed to varying levels of availability, but with a comparison to cooking, Spinella said the difficulty comes in finding the right proportions of each to optimize the artificial blood for patients with severe bleeding.
“It’s just like when you cook a meal, you know you have to put garlic, tomatoes, and basil in your sauce,” Spinella said. “But if you don’t get the proportions right, it’s not going to be very good.”
Teamed up with multiple other American universities and biotech companies as part of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program, the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC will also seek to optimize different proportions of blood components for different emergency situations.
“When you have a brain injury, the bleeding dysfunction that occurs is different than without brain injury,” Spinella offered as an example. “The very exciting thing about this project is that with the individual parts, we can hopefully put it back together again in different ways for different types of severe bleeding. You’re making a product specifically for specific patients instead of a one-size-fits-all.”
Another upside to artificial blood, per Spinella, is that artificial blood does not have a blood type. When a person donates blood, their blood can only be used for people who have the same blood type. The artificial blood used in this DARPA program, though, can be given to any recipient because of its artificial nature.
“This artificial red blood cell is a nanoparticle that’s made from a synthetic polymer. It’s not a human red cell that has proteins on it that will cause an immune reaction,” Spinella said. “It’s the marvels of bioengineering!”
