Artificial Blood Made from Human Stem Cells Could Plug the Donations Hole

June 4, 2014

(Deutsche Welle) – Mark Turner, medical director of the Blood Transfusion Service, is looking into how blood could be synthesized in the future. “We’ve known for some time that it’s possible to produce red blood cells from so called adult stem cells, but you can’t produce large amounts of blood in that way because of the restrictive capacity of those cells to proliferate,” he explains. What scientists can do, he adds, is to derive pluripotent stem cells – stem cell lines – either from embryos or from adult tissue.