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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."
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...
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.
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5. Can kidneys, livers and pancreases deal with this?
You meant to say "spleens" not "pancreases" right? I'm just guessing that you meant to name all three organs that effectively filter blood, and not just two of them and one other random digestive/insulin production organ that happens to be located nearby.
For a blood transfusion, the platelets (for clotting) white blood cells (fighting infections) and plasma (also for clotting) are separated from the red blood cells. Only the red blood cells carry hemoglobin, which carries Fe2+ iron ions.
Just by creating a synthetic red blood cell would eliminate the need for many blood transfusions.
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if they qualify under  50.24 Exception from informed consent requirements for emergency research, The probably. You have read this, right?
http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ecfr&rgn=div8&view=text&node=21:1.0.1.1.19.2.31.3&idno=21
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
True, but as Cillian correctly points out, the RBC is substantially more complex than the hemoglobin that gives it its color.
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.