Times of India
11 March 2011
Washington,DC USA

Transfusions Will Be Easier As There Will Be No Need To Match Groups
Scientists have taken an ‘important step’ toward the development of a universal blood product that would eliminate the need to 'type' blood to match donor and recipient before transfusions.

"Immunocamouflage" technique hides the blood cells from antibodies that could trigger a potentially fatal immune reaction that occurs when blood types do not match.

Maryam Tabrizian and her colleagues note that the blood transfusions require a correct match between a donor and the recipient’s blood.

This can be a tricky proposition given that there are some 29 different red blood cells types, which include the familiar ABO and Rh types.

The wrong blood type can provoke serious immune reactions that result in organ failure or death, so scientists have long sought a way to create an all-purpose red blood cell for transfusions that doesn’t rely on costly blood typing or donations of a specific blood type.

To develop this "universal" red blood cell, the scientists discovered a way to encase living, individual red blood cells within a multilayered polymer shell.

The shell serves as a cloaking device, they found, making the cell invisible to a person’s immune system and able to evade detection and rejection.

Oxygen can still penetrate the polymer shell, however, so the red blood cells can carry on their main business of supplying oxygen to the body.

"The results of this study mark an important step toward the production of universal RBCs," the authors of the study said in a statement. The report appears in the ACS journal, Biomacromolecules.