French researchers discover how to make blood from stem cells

French researchers discover how to make blood from stem cells

A team from the hospital Saint-Antoine in Paris managed to create and manufacture human blood from stem cells and even transfused it, a world first. It took six years of efforts by French researchers to produce some human blood. They took a donor of bone marrow stem cells and cultured them for three weeks to get a hundred billion red blood cells and put them back into the donor’s body: a successful experiment. Professor Luc DOUAY, researcher at the Inserm: "these red blood cells, once injected into humans, behave in the same way as the red blood cells injected during a conventional transfusion. So this is a formal demonstration that these red blood cells are functional. ' This is a breakthrough. Until now, all attempts at artificial blood transfusion have been unsuccessful. There are other steps that have to be taken. The experiment has been successful in self-transfusion. You now have to get a transfusion with two separate people. You don’t know how to make blood in large quantities. Marie Catherine GIARRATANA, research engineer at the Pierre and Marie Curie University: "It will take another 5 to 10 years, if only for the development of new technological tools. We’re working on it, so meet in 7-10 for the first massive productions." A hope. But in the meantime, blood donation will remain the only resource for transfusions. 500,000 people are transfused every year in France. We need 9000 blood bags a day.

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File : Stem cells: medicine of tomorrow?

Publication date : 2 September 2011