Blood cells made in a lab have been infused into people
The result will be a boon for patients with rare blood types
Until the 1940s, blood transfusions often went wrong because some of the main blood-group systems, such as the Rhesus factor, had yet to be discovered. This hit or miss approach to matching donors with recipients is now a thing of the past, as tests for all sorts of characteristics of an individual’s blood have become available. But finding a well-matched donor can still be difficult. Some patients have blood types so rare that there may be but a handful of appropriate donors in the country where they live.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Blood not so simple”
From the November 12th 2022 edition
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