Caitlin Raymond: Can Artificial Blood Solve Blood Supply Shortages?
Caitlin Raymond, a board-certified Clinical Pathologist and current Transfusion Medicine Fellow at the National Institutes of Health, shared a post on LinkedIn:
”The blood supply is short again.
It’s short often enough that ‘short’ undersells it. So the question keeps coming, from patients, from colleagues outside the field, sometimes from residents: why can’t we just make blood?
People have been trying for over a century.
My new post walks through why the last generation failed and wMore posts featured in Hemostasis Today.hat the newer approaches are doing differently.
- Hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers (HemAssist, PolyHeme, Hemolink) were discontinued largely over nitric oxide scavenging and vasoconstriction
- ErythroMer encapsulates hemoglobin in a freeze-dried nanoparticle, built as a direct answer to that mechanism
- Restore made history by transfusing lab-grown red cells, but it targets rare phenotypes and alloimmunized patients, not Tuesday’s shortage
- Hemopure is the one product from the original generation in real clinical use, in South Africa and under US expanded access
None of this fixes this month’s shortage. But ‘not yet’ is a different sentence than ‘never.’
Optimistic, in this field, has to mean optimistic about the trajectory, not the timeline.
If you work in a blood bank or transfusion service: which of these do you think reaches a patient first?”
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