Unlimited Blood Supply From Stem Cells

Dave writes: "The ABC has a story on some interesting stem cell research going on at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Seems that during their research, they were able to create red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets that were indistinguishable from the real thing."

Comments

Commercialization

[Winged Cat]

So, how long 'til someone starts using this commercially? How much do the unrefined techniques cost to make blood, versus cost of getting blood from donors and shipping them long distances? Presumably, blood manufacturing plants would be set up close to where they're needed, perhaps even in the hospitals themselves.

In fact, what do people think of the following model: a business is set up to develop manufacturing of these machines. At first, it leases blood production vats to its customers (first rich ones, then any as production becomes cheaper), using the money from leases to pay for development (including a forum for users of the system, to point out the good and the bad of various models). Over time, convert from prebuilt systems to kits, then to plans that hospitals can license so they can build their own (and with the rest of this plan announced so it's in the hospitals' self interest not to pirate). Then, once it gets cost of manufacture down to some reasonable price (say, under $1000 - in 2001 dollars - for a unit that can supply a small-city clinic for a year), it documents how to build these devices so cheaply and gradually shuts down, converting all leases to final sales. End result: technology is in the public domain, with an established tradition of end users building their own systems from commodity parts, and hopefully developed fast enough that no viable competitors can emerge to monopolize the field.

The only problem I can see with that is fees for licensing patents owned by anyone but the buisiness itself, for instance the university that discovered this process...