Arteriocyte’s Pharmed Blood Ready to be Evaluated by FDA

Arteriocyte, from Cleveland, Ohio, has sent an initial shipment of their pharmed blood product to the FDA for evaluation. Issues with storage, transportation and safety provided an incentive to search for alternatives to donated blood for use on the battlefield. Under a $1.95 million contract with the Pentagon’s DARPA project, the company has developed a process to produce fresh units of universal-donor (type O, Rhesus factor negative) packed red blood cells from hematopoietic stem cells. Although this has been possible on a small scale for many years, the main challenge is implementing this process on production-scale. The technology, which the company calls NANEX, permits 250-fold expansion of hematopoietic stem cells that are subsequently cultured in a unique environment of nutrients and growth factor to induce differentiation into enucleated red blood cells. The company is working on improving the production process, as one unit of pharmed blood currently costs $5,000 to produce. To make economical sense to use arteriocyte instead of donated blood, a unit will have to cost less than $1,000. Human trials aren’t expected until 2013.
More at Wired: Wired: Darpa’s Lab-Grown Blood Starts Pumping…
Company website: Arteriocyte…