The American Red Cross collects 14,000 blood and platelet donations for patients every day for use in 2,600 hospitals nationwide. Every two seconds, someone in the United States needs blood or platelets for treatment associated with burns, traumatic accidents, heart surgery, organ transplants or treatment leukemia, cancer, or sickle cell disease.

This past July, the  Red Cross made an urgent appeal for donations of blood and platelet due to an extremely low summer blood supply. One third of the population qualify to donate, but only about 10% do. One regional Red Cross chapter said, “Summertime is particularly challenging. There are people everywhere that need blood donations.” “The need for blood doesn’t break for vacation.” New breakthroughs may come to the rescue.

Researchers in Singapore have artificially created mouse blood and immune cells from skin cells. This is a significant first step towards the eventual goal: the engineering of new human blood cells from skin cells or other artificial sources. The researchers identified four factors, which are normally present in blood cells. They made a cocktail of these four factors and injected them into skin cells of mice. The result was different types of blood cells.

The most amazing thing about this to me is skin and blood cells could not be more different from each other. In effect, what the researchers have done is to rewrite the identity of skin cells. The technique is not yet ready for testing with human cells, but it is clear the breakthrough could pave the way for improved therapeutics for patients.

Read the full story at Scientists Successfully Create Blood from Skin Cells and read more about regenerative medicine and other technology breakthroughs in Health Attitude.