Dearth of blood in an emergency situation will no longer deter the treatment of a patient, as researchers from Delhi University's Department of Biochemistry claim to have developed a safe and portable blood substitute which can be used for all blood groups.
Professor Suman Kundu, who led the path-breaking research, has applied for a patent for the laboratory-made haemoglobin. Explaining the advantages of laboratory-made haemoglobin, Kundu said, "This lab-developed haemoglobin is a safe and portable blood substitute. It is cheaper, blood group neutral, easy to store, has longer shelf life, and no associated risk of transmission of diseases.”
He further said, "Traditional blood transfusion practice is to use blood donated by benevolent individuals. However, the worldwide supply of donated blood for transfusion is always woefully shorter than the demand, due to either a general aversion to blood donation or inability to donate blood due to medical reasons."
Scientists have thus been forced to look for alternatives to donated blood, which are called "artificial blood substitutes", "artificial haemoglobin" or "haemoglobin based oxygen carriers (HBOC)".
According to Kundu, researchers across the world have been trying for years to develop a portable blood substitute that functions as an oxygen carrier, is stable enough to be stored for prolonged periods in different conditions, and can be used to treat individuals of any blood type, but hadn't been successful so far.
"The protein (haemoglobin) easily releases a chemical compound called “heme” due to its breakdown under physiological conditions. Heme is severely toxic to the body when released from the haemoglobin molecule," he said.
In India, one unit of blood (350-400 cc) costs around `500-800, while this blood substitute will cost approximately 10-12 per cent less than that. Moreover, blood can be stored at blood banks for 40-50 days, while the substitute can be stored for three years, Kundu claimed.
The DU researchers have discovered that the “heme” can be tightly associated with haemoglobin by introducing a chemical bond between the two. "We changed one strategic amino acid (building block of proteins) in a model haemoglobin, named ‘myoglobin’, to a different amino acid which can make the desired chemical bond. The modified haemoglobin showed all properties like normal haemoglobin but did not release 'heme' under any experimental conditions," he said.
According to Kundu, the experiment can be implemented in practice and made commercially viable in the next two to three years. The research finding has been published in Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), an esteemed international scientific journal.