Emergency blood supply: Just add water

One of the most difficult parts about disaster response is having enough blood to give to injured people and then getting it to areas where infrastructure has been decimated after an accident or a natural disaster like an earthquake or tsunami.

But several scientists think they are on the way to solving this problem by creating a way to quickly make artificial blood. They have developed a substance called ErythroMer, which mimics the way real blood cells distribute oxygen in the body. They are 2 percent of the size of regular blood cells when stored dry in powdered form, before being mixed with water.

“Transfusion medicine is challenged by the limitations arising from storage of red blood cells, which are a living tissue, that must be kept cold, have a shelf-life of only 42 days, and must be used within about four hours of removal from refrigeration,” Dr. Allan Doctor, a professor of pediatrics, biochemistry, and molecular biophysics at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, told Time.

Doctor compared the powder he and his team developed to paprika.

“It can be stored in an IV plastic bag that a medic would carry, either in their ambulance or in a backpack, for a year or more,” Doctor told CBS. “When they need to use it, they spike the bag with sterile water, mix it, and it’s ready to inject right then and there.”

The scientists successfully used the substitute in mice, finding that ErythoMer carried oxygen around the animals’ bodies just as well as real blood cells did. Experiments with rats showed the powdered blood was successful in resuscitating animals who had lost up to 40 percent of their blood. The powder is made of “purified human hemoglobin proteins” coated with a polymer that allows it to be used with any blood type.

The findings were presented at the American Society of Hematology’s annual meeting earlier this month and have yet to appear in a peer-review journal, which subjects scientific work to additonal scrutiny.

More work is needed to replicate the findings on larger animals like rabbits and monkeys before the process could be tested on humans, which often don’t react the same way in scientific tests that animals do. The powder isn’t likely to replace real blood transfusions because it doesn’t stay in the body as long as a real red blood cell, but in emergency trauma situations could give a patient an infusion to sustain them until they reach a hospital.

The technology could also be used by medics in an ambulance or on a battlefield when the time it takes to reach a fresh blood supply could be too late for the patient.

“It’s quite a long road, possibly as long as 10 years, before we have definitive answers whether this will work in people,” Doctor told CBS.

This story was originally published December 20, 2016 at 6:49 PM with the headline "Emergency blood supply: Just add water."