Research

Stemming the need for donors

Issued: Fri, 06 May 2011 15:16:00 BST

video [mp4]

blood cells Do we take blood for granted? Our bodies contain about five litres of it and right now you have about 20-30 trillion red blood cells inside you. In the UK alone, 2.2 million units of blood are used each year at a cost of around £140 per unit. It's an industry worth millions of pounds – but it's also an industry fraught with complications.
Currently only 4% of people in the UK who are eligible to give blood are donors; the National Blood Service and the Scottish Blood Transfusion Service – the organisations in charge of collecting and distributing the UK's blood stocks – are always struggling to provide enough blood to treat patients. Not only is it a constant battle to keep up with demand, but the process of collecting the blood itself is expensive, costing the NHS about 3% of its annual budget. 
Scientists from Glasgow are hoping to solve these problems. Experimental haematologist Dr Jo Mountford is currently heading a project across four Scottish universities researching methods for manufacturing scale-up stem cells that are capable of producing red blood cells. The goal is to create an unlimited supply of red blood cells in laboratories. This work is in partnership with a £3 million Wellcome Trust initiative whose aim is to produce the clinically active stem-cell derived red blood cells to feed into the Scottish Funding Council project.
'The biggest problem with the way we collect blood at the moment is supply,' says Dr Mountford. 'We're always challenged to find enough donors – at the moment we're allowed to keep blood for 35 days maximum after it's been donated. It can only be used in that window and then it has to be discarded. If you look online the blood stocks are always listed and at certain times of the year, during summer holidays or in the Christmas period, the stocks get really low.'
The industrial generation of blood from stem cells would end current problems in maintaining supply and would also solve other issues such as managing the risk of infection and ensuring compatibility between donor and recipient. 
Stem cells can be manipulated by scientists to turn into many different types of cell, including red blood cells. However, although stem cells are versatile, they are notoriously tricky to work with, requiring careful handling so they develop correctly, as Dr Mountford explains: 'Firstly we try and make them into what is called mesoderm, which is the one body layer that makes things like muscle and bone and blood; then once we have made the mesoderm, we have to try and make them into blood and nothing else; once they're made into blood we have to try and make them into red cells specifically; and once they're red cells we have to make them eject the nuclei and mature properly. There are many different steps and we have to give them this chemical soup to try and point them in the right direction, but it's difficult.'
The real challenge, though, comes when the team try to scale the process up to industrial levels – the numbers involved are almost incomprehensible. 'A single bag of blood given to you if you need a transfusion has 2x1012 red blood cells in it – that's about two trillion red blood cells which is a ludicrously high number,' says Dr Mountford. 'We use two million bags of that a year so that's going to be about 4x1018 cells per year to replace the donor system in the UK alone. Getting to these kind of numbers and doing it at an acceptable cost per bag of blood is a really big challenge and that's where we're going with this next stage of funding.'
The project involves four Scottish universities – Glasgow, Heriot-Watt, Edinburgh and Dundee – working with Scottish Enterprise and the Scottish Blood Transfusion Service to establish a new bioengineering and manufacturing capacity for Scotland. Coordinated by Glasgow, the collaboration will be multidisciplinary with key research teams in the biochemistry, engineering and social science fields.
'The funding will allow us to start translating basic laboratory science into industrial processes,' says Dr Mountford. 'One of the main challenges of this project is the very large number of cells that will be needed; therefore we will need to develop new bio-processes and engineering solutions alongside the biology.'
However, if there is one place where this problem can be overcome it's Glasgow. The University is already a world-renowned centre for stem cell biology and for translational stem cell work. With 15 principal investigators currently working on stem cell research, Glasgow has grown into a real hub for collaborative research and, as Dr Mountford says, this could be the place where the next big breakthrough is made:
'If we were the people to crack it and to develop the know-how and potentially the intellectual property then it could be huge. But even if we don't get all the way, we're bound to find something that is useful for the process.'
This will also have a podcast to accompany it.
Links to:
Dr Jo Mountford
Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology

Do we take blood for granted? Our bodies contain about five litres of it and right now you have about 20-30 trillion red blood cells inside you. In the UK alone, 2.2 million units of blood are used each year at a cost of around £140 per unit. It's an industry worth millions of pounds: but it's also an industry fraught with complications.

Currently only 4% of people in the UK who are eligible to give blood are donors; the National Blood Service and the Scottish Blood Transfusion Service: the organisations in charge of collecting and distributing the UK's blood stocks; are always struggling to provide enough blood to treat patients. Not only is it a constant battle to keep up with demand, but the process of collecting the blood itself is expensive, costing the NHS about 3% of its annual budget. 

Scientists from Glasgow are hoping to solve these problems. Experimental haematologist Dr Jo Mountford is currently heading a project across four Scottish universities researching methods for manufacturing scale-up stem cells that are capable of producing red blood cells. The goal is to create an unlimited supply of red blood cells in laboratories. This work is in partnership with a £3 million Wellcome Trust initiative whose aim is to produce the clinically active stem-cell derived red blood cells to feed into the Scottish Funding Council project.

blood cells 'The biggest problem with the way we collect blood at the moment is supply,' says Dr Mountford. 'We're always challenged to find enough donors – at the moment we're allowed to keep blood for 35 days maximum after it's been donated. It can only be used in that window and then it has to be discarded. If you look online the blood stocks are always listed and at certain times of the year, during summer holidays or in the Christmas period, the stocks get really low.'

The industrial generation of blood from stem cells would end current problems in maintaining supply and would also solve other issues such as managing the risk of infection and ensuring compatibility between donor and recipient. 

Stem cells can be manipulated by scientists to turn into many different types of cell, including red blood cells. However, although stem cells are versatile, they are notoriously tricky to work with, requiring careful handling so they develop correctly, as Dr Mountford explains: 'Firstly we try and make them into what is called mesoderm, which is the one body layer that makes things like muscle and bone and blood; then once we have made the mesoderm, we have to try and make them into blood and nothing else; once they're made into blood we have to try and make them into red cells specifically; and once they're red cells we have to make them eject the nuclei and mature properly. There are many different steps and we have to give them this chemical soup to try and point them in the right direction, but it's difficult.'

The real challenge, though, comes when the team try to scale the process up to industrial levels: the numbers involved are almost incomprehensible. 'A single bag of blood given to you if you need a transfusion has 2x1012 red blood cells in it: that's about two trillion red blood cells which is a ludicrously high number,' says Dr Mountford. 'We use two million bags of that a year so that's going to be about 4x1018 cells per year to replace the donor system in the UK alone. Getting to these kind of numbers and doing it at an acceptable cost per bag of blood is a really big challenge and that's where we're going with this next stage of funding.'

The project involves four Scottish universities: Glasgow, Heriot-Watt, Edinburgh and Dundee; working with Scottish Enterprise and the Scottish Blood Transfusion Service to establish a new bioengineering and manufacturing capacity for Scotland. Coordinated by Glasgow, the collaboration will be multidisciplinary with key research teams in the biochemistry, engineering and social science fields.

'The funding will allow us to start translating basic laboratory science into industrial processes,' says Dr Mountford. 'One of the main challenges of this project is the very large number of cells that will be needed; therefore we will need to develop new bio-processes and engineering solutions alongside the biology.'

However, if there is one place where this problem can be overcome it's Glasgow. The University is already a world-renowned centre for stem cell biology and for translational stem cell work. With 15 principal investigators currently working on stem cell research, Glasgow has grown into a real hub for collaborative research and, as Dr Mountford says, this could be the place where the next big breakthrough is made:

'If we were the people to crack it and to develop the know-how and potentially the intellectual property then it could be huge. But even if we don't get all the way, we're bound to find something that is useful for the process.'

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