"Both nanopills and artificial blood have been successfully produced in the laboratory and have entered the animal testing stage."

"After all, it is a mature technology provided by the system. It is not too difficult to reproduce it in the laboratory."

"Next, it depends on the results of animal experiments and clinical trials."

"Of these two projects, artificial blood is more important and should be ranked first in priority."

Wei Kang looked at the artificial blood project and his face became serious.

Artificial blood is of extremely important significance for regenerative medicine.

Not only are blood banks often in emergency, but the medical community needs large amounts of fresh blood every day to save lives.

In fact, the human body is a complex system composed of many different parts, all of which are indispensable.

Skin, articular cartilage, cornea, blood, blood vessels, trachea, bladder, heart, brain, etc.

All the components are perfectly combined to form the entire human body.

In the entire human body system, blood plays an important role, connecting all organs and continuously transporting nutrients, energy and oxygen.

This is why people often compare the rivers that transport supplies across the country to blood.

For a machine like the human body, building all the parts from start to finish is not something that can be done overnight. It can only be done step by step from easy to difficult.

Just like upgrading and fighting monsters, you improve your skills and weapons step by step, and then defeat the final boss.

As soon as Duan Bu entered the scene, he brandished the lowest level weapon and ran straight towards the biggest boss.

Being able to produce the most complex human organs with full functionality is still an elusive goal.

But many special organizational building blocks have made great progress.

At present, humans have been able to create the simplest organs, such as skin, which are flat and relatively hard, which is the easiest step to achieve.

Some biomaterials used in plastic surgery and ophthalmology, such as cornea and cartilage, are also being developed.

The next level of complexity is creating tubular structures such as blood vessels and tracheas.

Hollow, non-tubular structures like the bladder are at the next level of difficulty.

The holy grail in this field is making solid organs like hearts, kidneys and livers.

Artificial blood is probably located between the skin and blood vessels and is an indispensable part.

Human research on artificial blood has a history of decades and some results have been achieved.

The artificial blood currently used clinically is a white fluorocarbon emulsion, regardless of blood type. It has an oxygen-carrying capacity that is 2 times higher than blood and 20 times higher than water. It can be used to temporarily replace some of the functions of blood.

After fluorocarbon artificial blood enters the human body, it can transport oxygen from the lungs to various parts of the human body just like real blood, and can transport carbon dioxide to the lungs and be excreted from the body.

From the perspective of oxygen metabolism, it is truly artificial blood.

However, this kind of artificial blood only has the ability to carry oxygen, and does not have platelets, plasma and other components. It can only be used as a substitute for hemoglobin and cannot truly transport nutrients between organs.

Therefore, the real promising direction for artificial blood lies in the field of stem cell hematopoiesis.

After the advent of iPS stem cell technology, scientists have been able to induce human somatic cells to generate pluripotent stem cells and continue to generate embryonic stem cells.

From this point of view, it is possible to induce and transform human somatic cells into hematopoietic stem cells, but the subsequent development is not satisfactory.

Hematopoietic stem cells are a kind of universal cell in the human body that can become any kind of blood cells, red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets, all of which are transformed from it.

Under normal circumstances, there are a large number of hematopoietic stem cells inhabiting the human body. There are about 3kg of hematopoietic stem cells in an adult, but 95% are in a dormant state and only 5% participate in daily hematopoietic activities.

Only when the human body loses a large amount of blood, the dormant hematopoietic stem cells will immediately become active.

This is because if hematopoietic stem cells multiply too much in the body, blood diseases such as leukemia will occur.

When expanded in vitro in the laboratory, hematopoietic stem cells will die quickly, lose their ability to self-renew, and cannot differentiate into other blood cells.

Research on artificially inducing hematopoietic stem cells to produce blood has continued for many years, but there has been no progress.

Only now, with the artificial blood technology provided by the system, has a major breakthrough been achieved in this field.

This technology mainly has two key breakthrough points.

One is to allow the hematopoietic stem cell transplant to maintain a self-renewal state and continue to multiply in the laboratory.

In this way, there will be a steady stream of fresh blood.

The other is to remove the blood group antigens on the red blood cells in fresh blood, thereby turning it into a universal blood suitable for transfusion needs of different blood types.

After the universal artificial blood is produced, physical or chemical methods are used to separate the various active components in the blood and make high-concentration, high-purity blood products.

Depending on the patient's condition, whatever ingredients are needed will be given.

In clinical medicine, this is called component transfusion. It is one of the symbols of modern blood transfusion and has become widely popular.

Fresh blood passes through a blood separator and is separated into white blood cells, red blood cells, platelets, and plasma for use in various situations.

Unless there is severe acute blood loss or massive bleeding, whole blood transfusion is required.

Otherwise, appropriate blood products will be transfused according to different situations.

For example, for patients with anemia, red blood cells will be transfused. If the patient has severe thrombocytopenia and has a bleeding tendency, platelet transfusions will also be required.

In addition, there are granulocyte transfusions to control bacterial infections and plasma transfusions to supplement coagulation factors.

Blood separation technology is very mature, so as long as there is a large amount of fresh blood to fill the blood bank, component transfusion is not a problem.

These two key technologies are closely related to the expression of two genes.
Chapter completed!