Synthetic Blood Can Made from Rice Now

Some countries experienced shortages of donor blood, so a lot of emergency room patients are often not helped. One of the much-needed blood components can now be made ​​from materials that are very abundant in Asia, namely rice.

This innovative breakthroughs pioneered by Yang He, a scientist from the Chinese University. Of the grains of rice, Yang He managed to synthesize components of the blood called Human Serum Albumin (HSA) are required for first aid at the emergency room.

In addition to the donor, Yang He said that the HSA is actually a lot of proteins is also required by the drug industry in several countries. Blood components is useful in the development of drugs and vaccines in the laboratory.

However, due to recent blood donors increasingly scarce, Yang He and his colleagues developed a synthetic HSA from rice. From 1 kg of rice, he managed to synthesize approximately 2.75 grams of HSA the exact chemical structure of native proteins from human blood.

"The surplus, because it does not come from the original blood of the HSA of rice is free of infectious disease risk," said Dr. Richard J Benjamin of the American National Red Cross when commenting on these findings, as quoted by FoxNews, Tuesday (01/11/2011).

The effectiveness of synthetic blood from this rice to replace the native protein from the blood has been demonstrated in a Yang He experiments with rats. Nevertheless, these findings still have to wait a few more years to be applied to humans.

Yet Dr. Benjamin said, the findings will not completely overcome the scarcity of donor blood because only bsia replace just one component of blood that is HSA. In practice, the required blood components such as platelets are very diverse.