Manufacturing Red Blood Cells: Why and How?

Blood transfusion is taken for granted by most people; if we need blood it will be provided by our clinicians. However, there are still issues in maintaining sufficient supply, controlling the possible risk from transmission of infectious agents and ensuring compatibility between donor and recipient blood groups. There remains an unmet and increasing demand for blood worldwide, with the UK alone using around 2.2 million units of blood per year.

A collaborative research team from the University of Glasgow, Heriot-Watt University, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Dundee has been working on developing and scaling up a process to produce red blood cells in suspension culture from human embryonic stem cells. The aim of this work is to enable on-demand production of universal donor blood with no risk of human virus transmission.

This talk will focus on why we need to manufacture blood and how this can be achieved.