What implications might this have for battlefield medicine?
Japanese scientists develop artificial blood compatible with all blood types
31–40 of 68 posts
Re: Japanese scientists develop artificial blood compatible with all blood types
#32Don't get your hopes up. This is astronomically away from anything real. The hard part hasn't even started.
All they know right now is that humans can tolerate their blood product. They have no idea if it actually helps. And testing that is going to be an ethical mess.
We've already been through this! PolyHeme was developed for decades, went into trials in 2009, and was a disaster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PolyHeme
Testing PolyHeme was a landmark in research ethics in the US. Obviously not in a good way. The problem is that you can only test these things in people who are very sick and then you hope that you aren't killing them. That's sketchy at best.
PolyHeme went a step further and tested on people without their consent in secret. https://www.annemergmed.com/article/S0196-0644(06)02263-3/fu...
They probably killed a dozen people or so. Lets hope this has a better outcome.
Re: Japanese scientists develop artificial blood compatible with all blood types
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happens to the IP when this happens? If the product works but wasn't supported by the right company how does it not get picked up by someone more competent?
I would imagine the IP was sold, especially if there was bankruptcy.
I think the question was why whoever picked it up didn’t do anything with it, which points towards it not just being an issue of incompetence, but maybe an underlying issue of the technology.
Re: Japanese scientists develop artificial blood compatible with all blood types
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would imagine the IP was sold, especially if there was bankruptcy.
I think the question was why whoever picked it up didn’t do anything with it, which points towards it not just being an issue of incompetence, but maybe an underlying issue of the technology.
Or a commercial blood bank bought it. Since this was based on cow hemoglobin and thus a thread to their business model.
Re: Japanese scientists develop artificial blood compatible with all blood types
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the question was why whoever picked it up didn’t do anything with it, which points towards it not just being an issue of incompetence, but maybe an underlying issue of the technology.
Or a commercial blood bank bought it. Since this was based on cow hemoglobin and thus a thread to their business model.
Or a patent troll, who are now busy working out how they can sue the Japanese scientists.
Re: Japanese scientists develop artificial blood compatible with all blood types
#36When I saw "compatible with all blood types", I thought it was another of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_substitute#Perfluorocarb... "full synthetic" ones, of which one is already in active use in Mexico and Russia.
Re: Japanese scientists develop artificial blood compatible with all blood types
#37When I saw "compatible with all blood types", I thought it was another of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_substitute#Perfluorocarb... "full synthetic" ones, of which one is already in active use in Mexico and Russia.
"PFC solutions can carry oxygen so well that mammals, including humans, can survive breathing liquid PFC solution, called liquid breathing."
Re: Japanese scientists develop artificial blood compatible with all blood types
#38Biopure was a company doing something similar in the US. They imploded in the early 2000s, but they had created an "oxygen therapeutic" (blood substitute) by isolating hemoglobin based oxygen carrying molecules FROM COW BLOOD! The fact that they weren't using whole red blood cells meant the product was typeless, room temp stable, and better at perfusing around arterial blockages and into tissue since the molecules we…
What happens to the IP when this happens? If the product works but wasn't supported by the right company how does it not get picked up by someone more competent?
You wait 20 years, then work on it once the patents have expired. This happens to lots of technologies, which aren't properly license while under patent protection, then take off once the protection expires.
Probably the most well known is animated GIFs, which had some popularity in early web pages, but quickly died off, then had a huge upsurge after the patent expired in the 2000's, when anyone could add animated GIF outputs to any program or web service, without licensing.
Re: Japanese scientists develop artificial blood compatible with all blood types
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently their first target is soon-to-expire donor blood erythrocytes — which makes this essentially a (pretty major) scalability improvement in how far existing donor blood goes. However, that being said: hemoglobin’s just a protein. Recombinant hemoglobin isn’t overly challenging to produce — we do it already. (Currently mostly animal hemoglobin, for vegan meat — but it’s no different to produce human hemoglobin…
> Currently mostly animal hemoglobin Nope. They're making _plant_ hemoglobin ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leghemoglobin ) to stay vegan. Yes, I was also surprised that freaking plants have hemoglobin. But apparently, legume plants use it to create the oxygen-depleted environment for nitrogen fixing bacteria to work.
DNA alone is not plant or animal. It's effectively saying 1s and 0s can be vegan (or not). Pretty silly.
Re: Japanese scientists develop artificial blood compatible with all blood types
#40When I saw "compatible with all blood types", I thought it was another of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_substitute#Perfluorocarb... "full synthetic" ones, of which one is already in active use in Mexico and Russia.
"PFC solutions can carry oxygen so well that mammals, including humans, can survive breathing liquid PFC solution, called liquid breathing."
Liquid breathing has always sounded horrible to me, wouldn't it feel like you're drowning constantly?