By Andres Sanchez Braun

Tokyo, Aug 14 (EFE).- Blood produced artificially is the simple formula proposed by a Japanese firm whose revolutionary project seeks to reduce the scarcity of donor banks, bring down the cost of blood preservation and avoid contaminated transfusions.

“One tends to think that blood is always available when a transfusion is required, but the truth is health workers are always concerned about supply,” head of the Megakaryon firm, Genjiro Miwa, told EFE in the company’s office at the Institute of Medical Science in the University of Tokyo.

Miwa hopes that by 2020 Megakaryon can mass produce platelet concentrates from genetic material that can be preserved for unlimited time by freezing, and hopes that further in the future they can do so with other blood cells as well.

Employing methods discovered nearly a decade ago, which allow platelets and red blood cells to be generated from iPS stem cells, the firm is now working with corporations from the pharmaceutical or chemical sectors and Harvard University to come up with an economically viable production system.

The idea is to be able to supply platelet based products without the need for blood donations, as is currently the system around the world.

Since platelets and red blood cells can only be stored for a maximum of five and 42 days, respectively, the continuous availability of donors is currently the only way to keep the blood banks constantly stocked.

With the youth accounting for most of the blood donors and the elderly among the largest consumers, many developed countries, with ageing populations, face a decline in supply.

Megakaryon calculates that at this rate, by 2027, there will be a shortage of 850,000 donors to meet global demand.

Another hurdle is the high cost of preserving the blood as well as testing to ensure blood quality, while poor and developing countries also have another problem: contamination of blood samples.

The problem of contamination has been worsened by a strong black market for blood donations, which has reached great proportions with disastrous consequences in regions with large populations and scarcity of banks, such as China, India and sub-Saharan Africa.

The idea for Megakaryon was developed in 2008 when Miwa, an economist with vast experience in the chemical industry, chanced upon his former classmate Professor Hiromitsu Nakauchi, a reputed geneticist at the University of Tokyo.

Nakauchi told him that he had succeeded in creating megakaryocytes – which are responsible for producing blood platelets – and red blood cells from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS).

iPS are mature cells – which can be obtained, for example, from a skin sample – that on reprogramming can be turned into any type of cell.

The doctor told his friend that for transfusions of artificial blood to become reality in the medium term, the impetus of private initiative would be essential.

“He said ‘you have been in administrative boards all your life and you see the damage it causes (the Lehmann Brothers’ bankruptcy has begun to unleash the global financial crisis). Now it’s your turn to do something good for others’. He fully convinced me,” Miwa recalled smilingly.

A year later, he set up the firm Icell to acquire the patents for Nakauchi’s discoveries, which were at the hands of the University of Tokyo, and in 2011, its subsidiary Megakaryon – which derives its name from megakaryocytes – was founded.

The initiative right away drew the attention of the US army which offered to finance it, but Miwa ruled out the option because they were against the idea of it becoming a “military project.”

Finally, in 2013, the company got key funding from Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, a public-private fund that includes some of the largest companies such as Toshiba, Sharp and pharmaceutical firm Takeda.

Megakaryon now hopes that “the second revolution in transfusions” continues to progress after 2020, with an increasingly improved supply of blood.

The idea is to offer, in the future, specific products for those who require regular blood transfusions – patients undergoing radiation or chemotherapy – and have rare groups of human leukocyte antigens, making it difficult to find compatible donors. EFE