Frozen semi-finished products
Researchers from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), a research enterprise of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Singapore, have developed a method for producing human red blood cells that reduces cultivation time by half compared to existing methods and uses optimized sorting and purification methods that are faster, more accurate and less expensive.
Blood transfusion saves millions of lives every year, but more than half of the world's countries do not have enough blood to meet the need for it. The possibility of producing red blood cells on request, especially of the universal donor group (0+), is of significant benefit to those who need frequent transfusions, for example, with leukemia, by eliminating the need to procure a large volume of blood and complex cell isolation processes.
Easier and faster production of red blood cells will reduce dependence on donated blood, which also carries a high risk of infection. The rapid and inexpensive production of red blood cells is also of great importance for the research of diseases such as malaria, which affects more than 220 million people every year, and may even contribute to the emergence of new and improved methods of cell therapy.
The production of red blood cells takes a long time and creates undesirable by-products, and modern purification methods are expensive and inconvenient for large-scale therapeutic use. SMART researchers have developed an optimized intermediate cryogenic storage protocol that reduces cell culture time to 11 days after defrosting, eliminating the need for continuous 23-day blood production. This is facilitated by additional technologies developed by the group for highly efficient and inexpensive purification of red blood cells and more targeted sorting.
In an article recently published in the journal Lab on a Chip, the researchers explain the technical advances they have made to improve the production of red blood cells. The study was conducted under the joint supervision of Jung Yoon Han, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Peter Pryzer, a professor at Nanyang Technological University (NTU).
Traditional methods of red blood cell production usually require 23 days for a full cycle. The new optimized protocol provides for the storage of cultured cells in liquid nitrogen after 12 days of the usual process and defrosting, followed by the passage of the remaining stages for 11 days.
The researchers have also developed new cleaning and sorting methods by modifying existing Dean flow fractionation (DFF) and deterministic lateral displacement (DLD), creating trapezoidal cross-section and microfluidic chip designs for DFF sorting, as well as a unique sorting system using a multicomponent inverse L-shape structure for DLD sorting.
New sorting and purification methods using modified DFF and DLD methods allow the use of parameters such as the size and deformability of red blood cells for purification, instead of spherical size. Since most human cells are deformable, this method can have wide biological and clinical applications, for example, for sorting and diagnosing cancer and immune cells.
When testing purified red blood cells, it was found that they retain their functionality, as evidenced by the high tropicity of malaria parasites, which usually affect only healthy red blood cells. This confirms that new technologies for sorting and cleaning red blood cells are ideal for studying malaria.
New sorting and cleaning methods can significantly reduce the processing time of cells and can be easily integrated into current cell production processes. This process also does not require a trained specialist and is scaled for industrial production.
Article by K.K.Zeming et al. Microfluidic label-free bioprocessing of human reticulocytes from erythroid culture is published in the journal Lab on a Chip.
Aminat Adzhieva, portal "Eternal Youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru based on SMART materials: SMART Researchers Develop Fast and Efficient Method to Produce Red Blood Cells.