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Scientists Make Artificial Protein Mimic Blood
Al writes "Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have created a protein that can carry and deliver oxygen — a useful step towards developing artificial blood. This would avoid the problems involved with donor blood — contamination, limited storage, and short supply — and lead to easier and faster blood transfusions on the battlefield and in trauma cases. The Penn researchers used three amino acids to make a four-helix columned protein structure put a smaller structure, called a heme, inside it. The heme is a large flat molecule that has an iron atom at its center, which oxygen binds to. The researchers also made the protein structure flexible, so that it can open to receive the oxygen and close again without letting any water in. They did this by linking together the helical columns with loops to restrict their motions, giving the final structure a candelabra shape."
... Vampires and Humans can live together in peace.
Conservation of angular momentum makes the world go round.
I, for one, welcome the advent of artificial blood. It is my hope that when the robotic overlords take over that they will see me as their brethren, and not as an outdated human. Pumping myself full of artificial blood brings me one step closer to that goal.
This sounds extremely cool, and very useful.
Some questions I would have is:
1. How much of this 'blood' can a human take before his/her body rejects it (if it ever does)?
2. How quick and expensive is it to create, say, a liter of blood?
3. Is there any reason that this blood wouldn't be able to combine with certain blood-types?
Either way, this is some great research that UPenn is doing. I'm excited to see where this goes.
Can I start drawing up business plans for my designer blood company? Green, maybe blue? What ever color you want it's up to you!
Maybe a nice neon pink?
My Comic : www.ourbadidea.com
Blame the artist for all mistakes!
This is clearly still unreal technology/Technocracy magic.
Some Vampire/Mage crossover munchkin is trying to change the consensual reality so the paradox stops popping his head open whenever he tries to conjure blood.
Obviously.
This would be a great thing in the ER. Blood type rejection is a major cause of complications and death. If we could develop something as safe as saline solution, that would not be rejected by the body, and would help carry oxygen it would simplify things greatly. It wouldn't even need to carry oxygen as well as blood to be effective. Human blood can be diluted to 10% and still carry enough oxygen, so if this fluid was greater than 5% as effective as blood and the patient had not blead out completely it would be more than enough.
We are the Borg...
They fail to give any meaningful data on its oxygen dissociation curve against pH, so we have no idea how it will perform as an oxygen transporter at physiological conditions. Also missing is any information on whether histidine groups are present above and below the heme which are quite important for regulating the binding and release of O2. While I am suitably impressed with their engineering of a protein from scratch, I will hold off on kudos for creating something useful until I see some hard data.
Why someone need to invent a protein to replace a 25 year old perftoran?
"You're the people who let your children die because you won't let them have blood transfusions."
With technology like this (to complement some other awesome medicinal advances) the use of blood (which is dangerous and expensive) in medical treatments will be marginalized. Most excellent.
Can this artificial blood be absorbed through the stomach/intestines into the blood stream? If so these guys will be gazillionares! Forget corn sugar and caffeine, "Drink Bl00d(tm)! Hyper-oxygenated, overly vitamin giga-vitamin-fortified Bl00d(tm)!
"Ready for a tequila shot, dude?"
"No, let's do some blood first."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Hemoglobin carries oxygen just fine. Why can't they use it?
Is it too hard to manufacture, too expensive, or ill-suited in some other way for use in an artificial blood?
TFA didn't answer that question.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Sounds like a fantastic doping agent.
A great milestone, but a paragraph near then end of the article outlines the obstacles still to be crossed:
To use the artificial protein in the human body, the researchers will need to make sure that it can hold on to the oxygen long enough to be useful, work in a cellular environment, and be nontoxic. The protein also must not be identified by the immune system as a contaminant to be flushed out through the kidneys, adds James Collman, a professor of chemistry at Stanford University, who makes synthetic hemes that bind to oxygen.
I would modify one sentence though: "hold on to the oxygen long enough to be useful and no longer"
What makes carbon monoxide so dangerous is that hemoglobin has more affinity for it than for oxygen. Once CO binds with it it is basically out of commission until the blood cell is reclaimed by the body. If this protein-heme compound has a higher affinity for O2 than hemoglobin, it could "suck" the O2 out of the remaining blood the person has, reducing the effectiveness of the circulatory system as a whole
That thing gota heme?
Right now, we are seeing an artificial elevation in Cancer and other diseases. More importantly, these are tied to sharing of blood. We all carry viruses, and this sharing of blood is preferable to dying right then, BUT, a slow death is not much better.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Research into developing new technologies which benefit life tend to be a good thing. Though if this winds up being used where Perftoran works better, then it is because of greed.
When will the "I last longer on synthetic" debate begin...
Not the fault of the Slashdotters, as the MIT Tech Review linked also emphasizes the wrong aspects of this work. If one goes back to the actual paper in Nature, it's immediately apparent that the researchers did not set out to create artificial hemoglobin. Instead, the work is a demonstration of biologically-relevant function occurring in a relatively simple molecule that was *not* explicitly designed for that function. In other words, the protein was designed to ligate a heme and have a hydrophobic core--and that's it. That it behaves much like hemoglobin is coincidental, and that is the point. No design was necessary to incorporate that function. It follows that in nature, life-supporting processes are the natural result of certain molecular properties.
.... This protein was created with absolutely no thought to toxicity or viability inside a biological organism. It was designed to test the hypothesis that biological processes can exist in a biologically-relevant framework (a protein, rather than, say, an inorganic metal complex) without being specifically designed-in or optimizing the framework to support said processes.
If this protein could eventually find application as an artificial hemoglobin, that's great, but the point of the work isn't to announce the creation of same, but to highlight the fact that there are many potential solutions to any given biological problem, and that complexity of form is not an inherent requirement for life-sustaining chemistry.
So, let's answer some "various questions" from above: 1) This has never been put inside a living creature, and it would likely be toxic in its current form. It would probably require significant re-design (changes in surface properties) to become immuno-silent.
2) While it looks like this is a relatively cheap protein to produce (it's expressed in E. coli per the Nature paper, with nothing exotic added to the media), producing and purifying protein is generally an expensive game. That's one reason why peptide-based cancer treatments are exorbitantly expensive.
3) Assuming an immuno-silent variant, blood type would be irrelevant.
4) The components of pretty much any protein are non-toxic, but it's impossible to know a priori if some fragments of such a protein would aggravate the immune system. Probably not, though, provided (again) an immuno-silent design.
5), 6), etc.
Even without a ready-to-use artificial hemoglobin, this work is significant because it implies that evolving biological function is a very simple process, and the solutions nature has found to the problems of biology are not the only possible solutions.
I think some fake blood is exactly what all these fake vampires need. Cranberry juice and V8 gets old after a while.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
I can't be a witness, I didn't even see the accident.
"Researchers at the University of Transylvania"...
There, fixed for ya!
I wouldn't get too worked up yet. They've shown a proof of concept, but it's got a long road ahead of it before this product would be deemed OK for use. Best of luck to them though. A product like this won't fully substitute ol' fashioned regular blood, but it could certainly buy some time in an emergency situation.
But now comes the hard part: how much product can we make and how cheaply? How does it break down? How does the body rid itself of this product when the time is right? What's the shelf life?
Lots of questions to go, but the concept is good!
What is wrong with just using ketchup in horror movies. Why would we want real blood?
All we need now is a giant rotating building and we can trap him until sunrise...
In "The Singularity Is Near", Ray Kurzweil explores some of the implications of artificial oxygen carrying fluid. Assume that it actually works as advertised:
...and on and on, in much more detail (and far more convincingly) than I can muster. Basically, such a thing could utterly revolutionize our idea of what is required to keep a human brain alive, that being the ultimate goal of our project.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Are we really to believe that a paragraph on Slashdot or Google News is as bad for Guardian Media Group as would be simply reading their articles straight from their RSS feed? Make no mistake: a ruling against aggregators is a ruling against RSS!!!
What are the differences from PolyHeme? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PolyHeme
which came out a while ago?
I remembered reading about this topic in popular science. Here is the article:
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2006-11/better-blood
Battlefield "first response" was a major topic, as getting oxygen to the brain during the first hours was one of the keys to survival.
Why, yes I have been touched by His noodly appendage. And I plan to sue.
Being an avid cyclist I hear about new blood drugs frequently.
The same hype was used for Hemopure when it first came out, except it had the nasty side effect of kidney failure, or so far as I can tell. Anyone else know definitively why the FDA won't test Hemopure? If this makes it out of the lab, I wonder how long it will be in the wild before they develop a test for it in endurance sports. Personally, I don't think it will. Blood drugs like Hemopure and Erythropoietin have a nasty side effect of death. I doubt this one will fair any better despite TFA's claims of safety.
Enriching!
Now, what will this mean for athletes, military, other types who get injured and get infused with "proxygen" (blood and java & coded Java) and get told to continue the fight?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
There already is an artificial blood marketed as "OxyGlobin". It's essentially recombinant bovine hemoglobin in an artificial plasma-like fluid. It is free hemoglobin, in the sense that it isn't bound into cells but is freely dissolved (or emulsed, I guess) in the electrolyte solution.
It's used in veterinary medicine and, IIRC, in the military and possibly in Europe. It recently failed to gain FDA approval for human use in the US because of negative side effects. In particular, apparently free hemoglobin tends to deactivate serum nitrogen oxides, which otherwise have a vasodilatory effect. When the nitrogen oxides are deactivated there is a greater risk of heart attack and stroke.
It actually is a great product otherwise, though. It doesn't require refrigeration, has a relatively long shelf-life, is universally compatible with recipients and tends to perfuse better (because the hemoglobin is free it can penetrate in a way that RBCs cannot). Too bad the FDA process pretty has pretty much killed it in the marketplace.
Seriously, blood is a core component for our bodies. Once you can swap it out with something better you get a lot more options. Artificial hearts tend to cause clotting. How about replacing the blood at the same time?
Along similar lines, I wonder how hard it would be to keep a brain (just the brain) alive on life support. Hook it up to an external interface (not simple, I know) then live virtually forever.
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Wouldn't it make sense to equip soldiers with emergency 'blood banks'? So in case of massive blood loss, the brain and heart close off to form their own little system, leaving the tougher tissues to fend for themselves? It's always annoyed me that my most essential systems are so closely tied in with what should be expendable extremities - it seems like bad design when losing a leg could kill my brain through loss of blood.
:P
Maybe the whole system just kind of evolved instead of being intelligently designed?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
I hadn't meant for this to become a Primer on the state of blood and artificial blood products, but considering the importance of the topic... blood is in fact life, and is therefore an issue worth going over thoroughly. The whole synthetic blood discussion is both fascinating and critically important. There simply isn't enough blood available for saving people's lives during disasters and large scale emergencies. That, and blood has a short shelf life so you simply can't build up stocks for the future. Lastly, transfusing blood comes with a raft of serious medical problems including distribution, contamination, typing accidents, rejection, allergies, tainting, and a host of unpleasant interactions that can span the gamut from uncomfortable to fatal. all of this underlines the need for a good synthetic blood alternative.
We're on the verge of amazing new products which will make sudden death or injury due to loss of blood or blood flow a problem of the past. Some of the more interesting work is being done in the following areas;
This has been an area of significant research and development. Part of the problem is that the naked HEME molecule is toxic and causes damage to the kidneys (and may also cause problems with the liver and spleen.) As well, until recently, artifical bloods had a serious problem with Nitric Oxide Scavenging resulting in constriction of the blood vessels, increased blood pressure, reduced blood flow, and ultimately tissue damage and death. Interesting work is being done on breakthroughs in both oxygen transport and the design of the vesicles which hold the the transport technologies.
You may be familiar with Perfluorocarbons from their use in deep sea diving, As seen in the movie "The Abyss". What you may not know is that Perfuorocarbon Emulsions are one of the leading candidates for a new Synthetic Blood Substitute. The coolest feature of this product, is that the droplets of perfuorocarbon are nano-scopic. Literally hundreds of time smaller than blood cells. When administered they pass through blood clots as easily as crickets would pass through a highway traffic jam. This means, your heart and brain could continue to receive plenty of life giving oxygen even if a clot stopped the blood flow cold. No more death or long term tissue damage from strokes or heart attacks. If this isn't cool I don't know what is!
This is more than a little further off in the future. Its a nano machine designed to store oxygen at around 50 atmospheres, and move freely through the blood stream like super small blood cells. You can read volumous writings and illustrations by nanotechnology advocates Ralph Merckle and Ray Kurzweil on this topic. You can also visit the subject at Wikipedia or see a cool video about them at Youtube. The respirocyte has the same advantages as perfluorocarbon, but will work even if your heart stops. So you have that critical golden hour to get to a hospital with what would certainly otherwise be a fatal condition or injury. Of course by this point, we'd almost certainly have all sorts of other nanotechnology available probably making the whole need for such devices moot. Maybe respirocytes would be the "Po Boy" technology available to those folks who couldn't afford godlike status.
Whatever succeeds in the market place, the future of synthetic blood substitutes is going to save a tremendous numbe