Get Ready for Plastic Blood
Snotnose writes:
People of a certain age remember when artificial blood was all the rage. Only problem was, it's recipients kept dying at a pesky rate. But now the Department of Defense is taking it seriously.
Blood runs through every human body. And yet there's still not enough of it. For one, not enough people are donating it. But it's also really hard to store, and it takes very special conditions to keep it healthy.
But there's a potential solution: an artificial version that wouldn't need to be treated quite as gently or refrigerated. The Department of Defense recently granted $46 million to the group responsible for the development of a synthetic blood called ErythroMer.
"If this synthetic blood substitute works, it could be absolutely game-changing because it can be freeze-dried, it can be reconstituted on demand, and it's universal," journalist Nicola Twilley says. It would save many lives: As she reported for the New Yorker, 30,000 preventable deaths occur each year because people didn't get blood in time.
See also: Japanese Scientists Develop Artificial Blood
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