Artificial blood wins investment

A UK life science company has been awarded a grant from innovation agency Innovate UK for a pioneering research project to develop artificial blood.

Based at The Heath Business and Technical Park in Runcorn, SpheriTech will receive £100k to help develop SpheriSome Hb – which they say could revolutionise the treatment of trauma patients.

Dr Don Wellings, the founder and managing director of SpheriTech, says: “Currently there are two sources of red blood cell used for transfusions – donated blood or recipient’s own pre-donated blood. However, blood typing and handling procedures as well as specific storage requirements, limit the feasibility of using donated blood in many cases. Therefore, with an aging population and consequently an increase demand for blood products, finding alternative blood supplies to meet the need is vital.”

Each year more than three million transfusions take place in the UK with the NHS Blood Transfusion Service collecting 1.7 million litres of blood in England and Wales which is given to around 500,000 patients. Yet, despite numerous attempts to come up with viable synthetic blood substitutes since the 1980s, there is no synthetic blood substitute currently available for human trauma patients in the US and Europe.

Now SpheriTech has is developing a novel blood substitute, Haemoglobin-based oxygen carrier (HBOC), which will be intravenously administered to deliver oxygen to the body’s tissues. Dr Wellings says it has the ability to be fully excreted from the body and not accumulate in various tissues, and is non-toxic, non-immunogenic, non-antigenic and non-carcinogenic.