Stem cell breakthroughs bring unlimited supply of lab-made blood closer

For the first time ever, blood-producing stem cells have been generated in a lab. Two separate teams of researchers have come up with differing ground-breaking methods to generate these important blood-forming cells, paving the way for the development of treatments for a variety of blood diseases and also offering a clear path towards an unlimited supply of lab-made blood for transfusions. 

For almost 20 years, scientists have been searching for a way to use human embryonic stem cells to make blood-forming stem cells. While various researchers have discovered methods to get stem cells to grow into other human cell types, the trick to triggering blood stem cell generation has remained elusive.

A team of researchers at the Boston Children's Hospital just published a breakthrough study outlining a new process that has successfully generated blood stem cells in a lab environment and shown these cells to be capable of making several types of human blood cells when put into mice.

Simultaneously to this remarkable announcement, a separate team of scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine announced a similar achievement in the generation of blood-forming stem cells in a lab, but by using a completely different process.

As well as looking to make unlimited supplies of clean blood in laboratories, this research directs us to new hopes for curing leukemia, correcting genetic defects that cause blood diseases such as sickle-cell anemia, and reducing the random lottery that is trying to find bone marrow transplant matches.