Bags of blood and not a donor in sight

摘要

Red blood cells generated in a lab have been successfully injected into a human volunteer for the first time. This is a vital step towards a future in which all the blood we need for transfusions can be made in the lab, so that blood donors are no longer essential. Luc Douay at Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, and his colleagues extracted what are called hematopoetic stem cells from a volunteer's bone marrow. These cells were encouraged to grow into cultured red blood cells using a cocktail of growth factors. After labelling the cells so they could be traced, Douay's team injected 10 billion - the equivalent of 2 millilitres of blood - back into the original donor to see how they survived.