[Medicine] A New Kind of (Blood) Farmer

A New Kind of (Blood) Farmer :
How DARPA (and Arteriocyte Medical Systems, Inc.) May Have Solved a Blood Crisis

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I have delayed a post regarding this topic due to the nature of the topic as well as wanting to give my other posts a little more life on the front page. Since I've been getting back into the swing of writing after the holidays, I figured I'd cover my own perspective on the topic:

DARPA (The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), an agency of the Department of Defense of the United States government, has "accidentally" figured out how to create red blood cells without a donor. Basically what this agency does is research and design advancements in technology (of all types) for military use. By researching the development of tissue generation through the use of umbilical stem cells (umbilical cord blood) they have figured out a way to create red blood cells without piping bags of blood out of a donor. Now, Arteriocyte is in the process of figuring out a way to make the process more voluminous. They can create red blood cells just fine. It's the volume of what they can produce at this point that is the problem... The DARPA expects Arteriocyte to be able to create a piece of equipment that can produce 100 units of blood a week for eight weeks in addition to being 47 cubic feet. Now, to me, 47 cubic feet seems to be a bit large; however, I guess if it's got a big medical symbol on it that will prevent it from being targeted by missiles and costing us a ton of money, right? :)

And now... my take:

Could you imagine people who go into operation that need blood transfusions having all of the necessary blood to keep them alive? How about eliminating the potential for cross-contamination, disease infected or "stale" blood available for patients in need? Or how about a time when we have transfusion/dialysis machines at home and need to swagger up to the local BloodBar and order a few pints to clean out the system? Ok, so perhaps the BloodBar example is a bit out there, but you get my point. The bottom line is this could be THE next big thing in the development of the medical field specifically and mankind in general. Sure, we can all have a nice, huge HDTV; however, blood is actually becoming more and more scarce (and expensive) as the levels of donation have dropped dramatically over the past 20 years.

I think that this could actually lead into some other advancements such as turning these stem cells into cells other than blood cells (think being able to grow a finger back or creating live prosthetics... as in... "You lose a limb, we can grow one for you"). This could go a long way towards branching what our body is capable of doing and what is medically possible.

Anyways, just a quick little post on something that I'd been wanting to talk about for weeks but didn't have the time to do. :)

Take care.