Wolfgang Miesbach: Blood Centres as Health Weather Stations
Wolfgang Miesbach, Head of the Hemostasis and Hemophilia Center at Department of Medicine II, University Hospital Frankfurt, shared a post on LinkedIn about a recent article by Angelo D’Alessandro, published in Blood, adding:
“Blood centres as health weather stations:
‘The information associated with blood may become nearly as important as the blood itself.’
Angelo D’Alessandro’s Perspective in Blood (3 September 2026) makes the case. Transfusion medicine was precision medicine long before the term existed: compatibility, screening, traceability, haemovigilance, 118 million donations a year.
The ‘blood unit plus’:
genomics at first donation for stable inherited traits, repeated metabolomics and proteomics across the donation career for changing physiology.
Omics entered the field for a practical reason to understand the storage lesion and why units that look equivalent behave differently in storage and after transfusion.
Returning donors turn snapshots into health trajectories. The dense geography of collection centres, linked across borders, becomes a distributed observatory of public health ‘health weather stations’.
Reciprocity as retention: in one analysis, donors aged 17 to 20 fell from 15.7 percent(2011) to 5.6 percent (2024) while demand concentrated in older recipients.
A digital donor twin gives something back to a health-conscious younger generation.
For the recipient: a unit today is defined by compatibility and availability.
A blood unit plus adds biological context that may predict storage behaviour and recipient outcome and clinical metabolomics could extend the same phenotyping to the patient’s own response.
Transfusion is the one field that follows a living therapeutic from donor to storage to bedside to outcome; enrich each link and the whole arc becomes analysable.
Caveat: 40percent of donations come from high income countries with 16percent of the world’s population.
Precision must not become a privilege of supply.”
Title: Precision transfusion medicine in the omics era
Author: Angelo D’Alessandro
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