Technology helps make blood donations safer, easier

“Faculty?”

The woman checking me in for the Lawrence High School blood drive was getting ready to type into a computer.

“No, just a dad,” I said, looking over at my daughter, who was smiling, pleased to see I had made it.

“Dad, you can sit over here,” Katy said, after I had been checked in.

I started filling out a form with about 50 questions designed to check out if my blood was OK.

Answering “no” to all the questions made me feel a little, well, boring  I hadn’t been to Great Britain or the Caribbean. And no, I hadn’t even had any aspirin lately.

Keeping it safe

In the last 20 years, technology has helped improve screenings and protect the blood supply, according to officials at the American Red Cross Blood Services Central Plains Region in Wichita.

The blood all of us who donated at the high school drive would be checked for HIV and hepatitis B and C. They’d also test it for blood type and for syphilis.

“The testing process itself is very sophisticated,” said Terri Dunaway, manager of donor resources development, a few days later in a phone interview.

“The new tests that are available to us are making the blood safer for us,” Dunaway said. “There are things we can tell the donor about that 10 or 15 years ago we didn’t know. Â The technology is a wonderful thing.”

One of the new procedures is nucleic acid testing. It’s designed to provide greater accuracy in checking for hepatitis C and HIV, said Lowell Tilzer, the Central Plains center’s medical director.

“They catch dozens of people who were not caught before by our old standard tests,” Tilzer said.

With the nucleic acid testing, only one in 2 million units will be tainted with HIV and one in 1.5 million with hepatitis C.

“Before it was slightly higher,” he said.

No more finger pricks?

Technology is also moving forward to make donating blood easier. A lot of people are squeamish about getting pricked in the earlobe or finger to get the small sample of blood that’s part of the screening process for red blood cells.

Tilzer had some good news. An optical thermal reader is being developed to determine the amount of red cells without getting the small sample.

Tilzer said he’s tried the experimental reader: “I much prefer that to getting my finger stuck.”

Scientists also are working to develop artificial blood, derived from cow blood or outdated human blood, which has a shelf life of only 42 days.

The military and hospital emergency rooms are interested in the use of artificial blood for transfusions, because it doesn’t have to be cross-matched and it could be available immediately.

In that process, which is still experimental and hasn’t yet been approved by the FDA, hemoglobin from outdated human blood is purified and cleansed.

“They are doing clinical trials to see if the material will work as well as real blood,” Tilzer said. “The trouble with it is it only lasts 35 hours, compared to our red cells which last 120 days. It’s not quite ready for prime time.”

New blood

Will biotechnicians ever be able to create blood in a lab setting?

“I think it has a chance,” Tilzer said.

A paper presented last year to the National Academy of Sciences described the production of red blood cells, white cells and platelets from embryonic stem cells.

A team of University of Wisconsin researchers created primitive human blood cells. Those cells can develop into red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets.

However, much more research will be needed before biotechnicians are manufacturing blood, Tilzer said.

“I figure (that will happen) in the next 25 years perhaps, but not in the next 10,” he said. “It’s going to take a long time to gear up from experiment to lab to automated production. There’s a steep learning curve.”

So blood donors will continue to be needed for years to come. And it’s important to encourage blood donation programs at high schools so students get into the habit early, Dunaway said.

A sweet trade

After a few minutes sitting in the chair, a woman in hospital scrubs took my unit of blood, bandaged me up and sent me over to a waiting area.

Katy, who was helping in the drive, brought me a bottle of water. We watched the other donors going through the process.

“Dad, do you want a bagel?”

I shook my head and grabbed a cookie. It seemed like the better trade.