Skip to main content

Is this the future of medicine? Synthetic blood could buy patients 48 extra hours

Erythromer, a nanoscale bio-synthetic artificial red cell

Finding blood donors continues to present a challenge across the United States, with hospitals and medical professionals often citing a blood shortage in areas of the country. And while there’s no doubt that we still need folks to visit their local blood drives with hopes of saving a life with their donation, science has stepped in with a new temporary solution. Two scientists — Dr. Andre Palmer of the Ohio State University and Dr. Dipanjan Pan, an associate professor in the department of bioengineering at the University of Illinois — have now independently developed two synthetic blood technologies.

Dr. Pan’s product is called ErythroMer, and while it is not, in fact, a blood substitute, it is an “oxygen carrier that can be given as an oxygen-delivery vehicle that can kind of act as a stop-gap measure to keep the injured alive until they get to the hospital,” Pan told Engadget. Essentially, ErythroMer is a manmade hemoglobin — the protein in red blood cells responsible for carrying oxygen to various parts of the body. Because ErythroMer is produced in powder form, it’s capable of being stored for up to six months, which is significantly longer than the shelf life of actual human blood — even when it’s stored properly on ice it can only last up to 42 days. Moreover, because this hemoglobin molecule is artificial, there is a reduced risk of transferring blood-borne diseases like HIV or Zika during transfusions.

As it stands, Pan and his colleagues are hoping to use ErythroMer in military applications, though if successful, the synthetic  blood could doubtless be used in civilian operations as well. Excitingly, NASA has already expressed interest in the synthetic blood, as it may come in handy as astronauts are sent to planets beyond our own.

Meanwhile, Dr. Palmer has created a polymerized hemoglobin, or PolyHb, that is quite similar to Erythromer. It is also based on natural hemoglobin, then encased in a polymer, and is meant “to give the patient enough time to get to a hospital to get a blood transfusion because ultimately, if you lose blood, the best thing you can be transfused with is blood,” as Palmer noted. Again, like Erythromer, PolyHb can be delivered in powdered form, which cuts down on its weight and mass by 50 percent.

This is important as it means that PolyHb is particularly portable, which could be hugely important when treating wounded soldiers on battlefields, or patients in difficult to access areas. All PolyHb needs to be reconstituted is some purified water — then, the powdered platelets can be transfused as needed. PolyHb buys patients up to 48 hours of extra time, which could be the difference between life or death in many medical situations.

While all of these advances are certainly met with excitement by the medical community, there are, of course, still shortcomings. Currently, neither ErythroMer nor PolyHb can do more than transport oxygen — while this is a major function of blood, it’s not the only function, which means  that you couldn’t replace your entire bloodstream with these synthetic solutions.

As Palmer told Engadget, “You’d have the oxygen-carrying therapeutic, and then you’d have something that initiates clotting, for example. So it is possible to mix two different therapeutics together to achieve extra functions.” We’re just waiting on that possibility to become a reality.

Editors' Recommendations

Lulu Chang
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more