For the first time, scientists gave people a blood transfusion that was grown in a laboratory

Most blood transfusions will always depend on people donating blood. However, the researchers’ goal is to produce viable but very rare blood groups that are difficult to obtain.

They are essential for some people who depend on regular blood transfusions for conditions such as sickle cell anemia. If the blood of the donor and the recipient does not match exactly, the body will begin to reject it and the treatment will fail.

Study author Ashley Toye of the University of Bristol said some blood groups are “very rare indeed” and that “there may be only ten people in the country” who can donate such blood.

For example, he cited the blood group known as “Bombay”, which was first identified in India. Experts have only seen this phenotype in three people in Britain.

In one experiment, scientists “fished” stem cells from donated blood using magnetic beads and cultured red blood cells from them until they were ready for blood transfusion. The whole process took about three weeks.

“In the future, we want to produce as much blood as possible. So my vision is a room full of machines that will continuously produce it from regularly donated blood,” Toye said.

“This challenging and exciting test is literally a huge springboard for producing blood from stem cells,” he believes, according to The Guardian newspaper.

So far, two people have participated in the clinical study, which wants to test the blood of at least ten healthy volunteers. All research participants will receive two doses of five to ten milliliters of blood – one donated and one produced in the laboratory – at least four months apart.

The researchers added small amounts of a radioactive substance commonly used in other medical procedures to the blood to see how long it would remain in the body. They hope laboratory-grown blood will be more effective than normal blood.

Red blood cells usually last around 120 days before needing to be replaced. Typical donated blood contains a mixture of young and old red blood cells, while lab-grown blood is all freshly made, so it should last a full 120 days. The researchers speculate that this could allow for shorter and less frequent transfusions in the future.

But research faces financial and technological problems. According to scientists, it is unclear how much it will cost to grow blood in a laboratory. Another problem is that the stem cells used to grow red blood cells become depleted over time, limiting the amount of blood that can be produced.