Blood is highly complicated.
I think the HN audience understands it at a level of "blood is red cells, white cells, and platelets", but that's really not the whole picture. Blood also has plasma which is composed of gas, nutrients, proteins, ions, and water. We can actually refine blood plasma down to a state where it's basically 100% safe even if someone with "bad blood" donated it.
These 4 different blood components all get seperated at the lab, frozen for storage, and turned into individual products which can be mixed+matched depending on medical need.
Don't get me wrong, growing red cells in a lab is awesome, but I don't see it the same way a lot of comments in this thread do (solving a storage issue, saving a lot of lives, etc).
I think the realistic applications of lab-grown-blood over the next 15 years will be closer to treating rare diseases or possibly rare blood types (some people exist outside the typical A, B, AB, O groupings). I don't see this fixing logistics or supply/demand issues in the next 15 years, especially with how highly regulated the blood supply is in any first world nation.
I think the HN audience understands it at a level of "blood is red cells, white cells, and platelets", but that's really not the whole picture. Blood also has plasma which is composed of gas, nutrients, proteins, ions, and water. We can actually refine blood plasma down to a state where it's basically 100% safe even if someone with "bad blood" donated it.
These 4 different blood components all get seperated at the lab, frozen for storage, and turned into individual products which can be mixed+matched depending on medical need.
Don't get me wrong, growing red cells in a lab is awesome, but I don't see it the same way a lot of comments in this thread do (solving a storage issue, saving a lot of lives, etc).
I think the realistic applications of lab-grown-blood over the next 15 years will be closer to treating rare diseases or possibly rare blood types (some people exist outside the typical A, B, AB, O groupings). I don't see this fixing logistics or supply/demand issues in the next 15 years, especially with how highly regulated the blood supply is in any first world nation.