Could Science Create a Better Blood Supply?

Millions of lives are saved by blood transfusions every year, but sometimes donations are in short supply. Learn how researchers are hoping to make more blood universally transferable in this episode of BrainStuff. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren bog Obam here. For years, scientists have been toiling
away in laboratories trying to make blood better, or maybe
more accurately better for more people. That's one of the
things that the Withers Research Group at the University of
British Columbia is working on pretty much every day. You

(00:25):
may know the basics of blood types. Humans have various kinds.
If you need a transfusion, say you're injured in an accident,
or you're in the operating room awaiting some procedure, you
need the right type of blood, either A, B, A B,
or O, and either positive or negative. You need either
your exact blood type or type O negative, which is
considered universal and acceptable by all. According to the American

(00:48):
Red Cross, a blood transfusion is needed every two seconds
in the United States, and every year four point five
million lives are saved by safe transfusions. So Type OH
is in high demand and and in short supply. So
scientists have been fiddling with ways to convert Type A
blood into Type OH that would solve a lot of
supply and demand problems, and they're getting closer every day.

(01:12):
For more than four years, the Wither's lab on the
Vancouver campus of UBC has been just sciencing the heck
out of the challenge. Researchers there have been experimenting with
different approaches to strip certain sugar molecules from the surface
of type A red blood cells, effectively turning the cells
into Type O which do not contain those sugar molecules.

(01:32):
These molecules, called antigens, are what makes transfusions of different
types of blood problematic. Type B blood, for example, contains
antibodies that will attack those sugars on Type A blood
cells if the bloods mix and vice versa, but having
no antigens, Type O blood is not attacked by other
blood types antibodies, which is why Type O is in

(01:54):
such great demand. The answer to ridding Type A blood
of its antigens, first proposed and demonstrated in the nineteen eighties,
was to use an enzyme that would in effect eat
those sugars. Wather's and his team building on that we're
searching for a better enzyme, they turned inward. In a
manner of speaking, they turned ultimately to the human gut.

(02:17):
Wather's explained, what you're doing is you're essentially choosing an
environment it's likely to contain enzymes to do the job
you want, and then you try to isolate your genes
and ultimately your enzymes from that environment. One of the
key steps is, in my mind, is actually choosing your
environment in the first place. Is it going to be
a bunch of soil, some ocean water, what's it going

(02:38):
to be. Wathers and his group considered places where blood
and bacteria would come in contact, say in mosquitoes or
vampire bats or leeches. Wathers said, but the complication is
that it's only primates, that is, apes and ourselves that
have the a BO blood system, So mosquitoes et cetera
would have to be feeding on human blood, and none

(03:00):
of my graduate students seemed keen to volunteer. The researchers
settled on the human gut to the gastro intestinal walls,
where bacteria have been found to feed on similar sugars.
The theory was that they could take human DNA from
a stool sample and isolate the genes that encode the
bacteria to do their sugar eating thing in the gut.
Then they could see if that bacteria would do the

(03:22):
job on the sugars on type A blood cells, and
fortunately for them, human poop is in relatively great abundance.
After screening, cataloging, and sequencing the DNA, the researchers finally
found a combination of enzymes that worked which effectively stripped
the sugars from type A blood. Their findings were announced
in June of twenty nineteen in the journal Nature Microbiology.

(03:46):
Postdoc student Peter Rathfield, the lead author on the paper,
said in a release, this will really drive forward the
option for blood banks to manage the blood supply as
soon as we can be sure it's safe. Testing to
establish that the enzymes don't strip the blood of anything
else and that the enzymes get all of the antigens
from the surface of type A blood cells continues with

(04:07):
He said, definitely, the research is still ongoing. One part
is doing all these things on safety. The other part
is trying to look further to see if there's even
better enzymes, and also to look out for better enzymes
for converting B type blood. We focused on A because
that's the most challenging one before, and partly because there
are reasonable enzymes for B. The Withers group also is

(04:31):
perfecting new methods of screening DNA at a smaller volume.
All of it, maybe soon could help make blood shortages
a thing of the past. Today's episode was written by
John Donovan and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is
a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For
more in this and lots of other bloody awesome topics,

(04:52):
visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com and
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