Stem cell blood set for UK human trials within three years
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April 14, 2014 5:18 pm
Stem cell blood set for UK human trials within three years
By Clive Cookson
Blood made from stem cells will be tested in patients within three years as the UK aims to be the first to succeed in a long worldwide quest to provide an alternative to natural blood.
The Wellcome Trust says that, after four years of research, its £5m Blood Pharma programme has made enough progress turning stem cells into red blood cells “to start the first in-man trial by late 2016”.
That would be followed the following year by more extensive clinical testing, in which researchers would compare patients’ response to donated and man-made blood transfusions.
Marc Turner, medical director of the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service who is leading the programme, said: “Producing a cellular therapy which is of the scale, quality and safety required for human clinical trials is a very significant challenge, but if we can achieve success with this first in-man clinical study it will be an important step forward to enable populations all over the world to benefit from blood transfusions.”
The researchers have been working with both human embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) – adult cells genetically reprogrammed to return them to an embryonic state. These have the capacity to turn into any type of specialised cell.
The Blood Pharma team, a consortium based at several universities, has found a biochemical environment that produces adult red blood cells efficiently from embryonic stem cells and iPSCs. The last stage in their conversion sees the developing blood cells eject their DNA to adopt the enucleated state characteristic of red blood cells.
“The first in-man trial will probably use embryonic stem cells, but then we will move on to [iPCSs] because these make it easier for us to choose the blood group,” said Joanne Mountford, a collaborator at Glasgow University. The researchers want blood equivalent to group O, rhesus negative, which is regarded as a “universal donor” compatible with all other blood types.
Although attempts over several decades to create synthetic blood in which the red blood cells are replaced with chemical carriers of oxygen have not succeeded, the Blood Pharma scientists are confident that their more natural approach will work much better.
But Dr Mountford says news of the stem cell trial should not put anyone off donating blood, because several years of increasingly large clinical trials will be needed before the technology has been scaled up and tested to the extent needed for com
