Australian researchers believe lab-grown blood could provide a life-saving option for those with rare blood types, as they work to redesign a manufacturing process that currently takes far too long and is wildly expensive.
For Joe Fa’agase and his brothers, blood is more than just a bond – it’s quite literally running through their veins. They all have the extremely rare JK null blood type and are donors for their aunt.
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“They’ll message us and be like, oh, we’re just letting you know she’s going into an operation and then we have to be able to stand by and physically fit, ready for that,” Fa’agase said.
“There’s only 14 active donors in Australia, so it’s really hard to get enough cells sometimes,” Lifeblood researcher Dr Becky Griffiths said.
Australian researchers are now trying to fill that gap by growing red blood cells in laboratories – something that’s been done before but never at a scale for medical use.
“It’s possible and the science is there, but it’s just really too expensive to reach people,” University of Queensland’s Dr Mark Allenby said.
Cost is currently the biggest barrier to scaled-up production. Just a few teaspoons of lab-grown blood costs around $70,000, making a bag around the $1 million mark.
The $2.5 million project is trying to unlock new manufacturing technologies, not to replace human donations, but provide a life-saving backup for those with rare blood types and potentially newborns.
“If we can manufacture cures for people in Australia, then we can get them to those patients in an accelerated way,” Smart CRC CEO Professor Simon Cool said.
“We hope by the end of four years that we really will have achieved some really good scale-up,” Griffiths said.
The next step is clinical trials.
