Donated blood is often in short supply, so to prevent dire blood shortages, scientists are figuring out a way to synthesize blood in the laboratory. However, researchers often face difficulties because they can’t effectively induce enucleation, a crucial process in mammalian red blood cell maturation.

“So far, there is no soluble factor described which is able to trigger this enucleation process,” said Julia Gutjahr, a cell biologist at the University of Konstanz.

Recently, Gutjahr’s team found that CXCL12, a signaling protein, may solve this problem.1 When the researchers exposed mice erythroblasts, or immature red blood cells, to CXCL12, they triggered enucleation. Their findings, reported in Science Signaling, may help advance efforts in making blood in the lab.

“The rate of enucleation limits the production rate [of artificial blood], so anything that leads to a better understanding of how the maturing red [blood] cell might extrude the nucleus is great and to be celebrated,” said Cédric Ghevaert, a hematologist at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the study.

In a pair of fluorescent-lit rooms on both sides of the Atlantic, the guinea pigs awaited their fate. They were not literally guinea pigs. Two were lightly sedated, extremely fluffy white rabbits resting on pee pads; the other was Nick Green, a sixty-four-year-old part-time administrator at the University of Cambridge who reclined, hands clasped atop his patterned sweater, on the starched sheets of a hospital bed. All three were hooked up to machines that provided a readout of their vital signs, and all three were prepared to have a syringe of manufactured blood injected into their veins.

Researchers have found a way to grow more blood cells from donated blood that could be used to supplement traditional supplies.

A woman with sickle cell disease said the possibility of lab-grown blood has given her "hope" for the future. The aim of the new research is to help those with ultra-rare blood groups who need regular transfusions.

For the first time ever, blood grown in a lab from adult stem cells was transfused into two people. The trial will be expanded to include 10 participants, with scientists comparing the lab-grown blood’s longevity to that of a traditional transfusion.

Volunteers have received a blood transfusion of laboratory-grown red blood cells in a world-first clinical trial in the UK.

Laboratory grown red blood cells have been transfused into volunteers in a world first clinical trial that could help revolutionise treatments for patients with sickle cell disease and thalassemia.

Transfusions using laboratory-grown blood are being tested in British patients for the first time, in a study that doctors hope could improve treatment for patients who need regular donations.

Last year, researchers began a pioneering clinical trial, and more are on the way, bringing us closer to a world where blood factories augment supplies.

Scientists around the world are in a battle to develop the tastiest artificial beef, pork, coffee and milk. But in Cambridge an academic is trying to reproduce a product even more vital: blood.

After decades of research, clinical trials of artificially made blood are getting under way, offering hope of a backup to human donors.

Scientists have made a significant leap towards mass producing platelets – the part of the blood that forms clots.