DARPA: Blood Pharming + Human Progenitor Cells + 2013 Update
The Blood Pharming program is developing novel technologies to enable in vitro production of red blood cells (RBCs) that are untainted, readily available, and free of storage lesions. The ultimate target of the program is the development of an automated, fieldable cell culture and packaging system capable of producing transfusable amounts of universal donor RBCs using human progenitor cells as starting material.
It is imperative that RBCs produced by the progenitor-based system be functionally equivalent to fresh donor cells especially with regard to O2-carrying capacity and morphology. The automated cell culture system must be capable of maintaining a self-renewing progenitor population, providing a milieu for efficient differentiation along the erythroid pathway, sorting/purifying end-product RBCs, and packaging “ready for transfusion” RBCs.
Technical areas addressed by the program include progenitor cell biology and erythroid differentiation, RBC physiology, cellular support matrices/scaffolds, automated cell culture systems, and cell sorting, purification and packaging.
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