cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15069736
Bacterial enzyme strips away blood types to create universal donor blood
“Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and Lund University, Sweden, have used enzymes produced by a common gut bacteria to remove the A and B antigens from red blood cells, bringing them one step closer to creating universal donor blood.”
Is it cost effective?
Probably not at this point since it’s still being developed, but hopefully it will be!
It’s a good development, but only works for first time recipients of blood. This only works on ABO group antigens. There are multiple dozens of others, as soon as you get a transfusion once you’ll have antibodies to non-ABO antigens and have to get crossmatched like anyone else.
Cool, but I don’t see it changing blood banking or transfusion medicine all that much.
I don’t feel like they were expecting this to change a lot right now - it’s a stepping stone
bringing them one step closer to creating universal donor blood."
Well in an emergency, once can be the difference between decades of life or near-immediate death, so I’d still call this a massive win…
Having worked in the blood bank I just don’t see this as a massive win. Win, sure. Massive? ABO issues are a tiny fraction of what the blood bank deals with. If all blood was O neg blood bankers would still have a busy job. I’d be more excited to see a development in reducing TRALI, creating 30 day platelets or something like that. I just don’t see this as fundamentally changing much in the blood bank. More O is good of course, but blood bank is way more involved than that.
Fair enough. I guess I’ll stop being excited about the good news and instead focus on how it could have been better 😉
How many people do receive more than one blood transfusion on average? Seems like something that doesn’t happen often, and maybe this could make it easier for the most common uses of donor blood?
They specially mention this in the article. It does work on multiple antigens beyond ABO, they even list that there are over 40 blood types that we know of with 300+ antigens.
Did what you do at a blood bank involve an education or just a name tag, cause they have receptionists and hourly workers at blood banks.
I believe “Vampire-fluffer” was their official title.
As a side note, I derived silly amounts of joy from this one simple action:
Fuck off with the personal insults.
Clearly, “Vampire-fluffer” is too far over the top to be considered anything but pure silliness.
Unless I’ve accidentally stumbled on something close to the truth? 😄
