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Reza Shojaei: Manufactured Red Blood Cells vs Blood Donation

Reza Shojaei/LinkedIn

Oct 23, 2026, 15:13

Reza Shojaei: Manufactured Red Blood Cells vs Blood Donation

Reza Shojaei, Chief Operating Officer at Canadian Plasma Resources, shared a post on LinkedIn:

“Can we manufacture red blood cells instead of relying exclusively on collecting them?

It is a fascinating idea.

But at this stage, it still looks much more like a scientific ambition than a practical alternative to blood donation.

One of the developments that caught my attention at AABB was progress in manufactured red blood cells, or mRBCs.

According to AABB, Safi Biotherapeutics is developing a process that starts with hematopoietic progenitor cells and expands and differentiates them into red blood cells over approximately 21 days.

That is scientifically impressive.

It may also eventually have important applications for patients who are difficult to match, including some people with sickle cell disease or complex antibody profiles.

Manufactured cells with defined antigen characteristics could potentially provide more consistently matched products for selected patients.

But we should keep the scale of this development in perspective.

Today, this is not a substitute for blood donation.

It is not yet a mature, scalable or widely available manufacturing solution.

Major questions remain around cost, manufacturing capacity, regulatory approval, clinical performance, and whether production can ever reach the scale required to support routine blood systems. Safi hopes to begin a U.S. clinical trial in 2027.

Meanwhile, the real and immediate challenge is much more basic:

The world still needs people to donate blood.

And that need is especially urgent in low and middle income countries (LMICs).

WHO has repeatedly highlighted the enormous global disparity in blood availability.

High income countries collect a disproportionately large share of the world’s blood despite representing a much smaller share of the global population, while many lower income countries continue to struggle with insufficient collection, infrastructure, testing capacity, trained personnel and reliable access to safe blood.

In many health systems, the challenge is not how to manufacture blood in a bioreactor.

It is how to make sure a mother with severe bleeding, a child with malaria related anaemia, a trauma patient, or someone requiring surgery can receive a safe unit of blood when they need it.

That reality matters.

Manufactured RBCs may one day become an important complement to conventional donation, particularly for specialized or hard to match patients.

But for now, they remain closer to a promising dream than a solution to the world’s blood supply problem.

And while we watch that science develop, the most important message should not get lost: