Artificial blood

Number of times patient dies just because of unavailability of blood or missing of blood of same group in hospitals in cases of emergencies. Now a day’s scientists are working on artificial Blood which is prepared from liposomes encapsulated hemoglobin (LEH) . The major problem which can be soughed out by this is, LEH does not contain any blood group antigens (no blood type such as A, B, AB or O) therefore same preparation can be infused to patients of different blood groups. Second advantage with LHE is that, liposome is consist of natural phospholipids & cholesterol and do not have a tendency to cause antigenic reactions. Thirdly, it can be easily sterilized and made virus free in larger quantities at a time. Last but not least is its size, which is smaller as compare to RBC (200 – 500nm) which is suitable for substituting the function of gas supply of red blood cells. Life time of these LHE can be further increased by PGElyation. The major drawback with LEH is their instability at different temperatures, size variation or increase in size during storage due to coalescence or aggregation of two or more liposomes. It also tends to leak hemoglobin from the on aging which leads to decrease in strength with time. Still research and development work is going on to improve all these pitfalls. This technology is still at laboratories scale and will be of great significance in the future.