PLoS ONE (Mar 2011)

Blood banking in living droplets.

  • Josh Samot,
  • Sangjun Moon,
  • Lei Shao,
  • Xiaohui Zhang,
  • Feng Xu,
  • Youngseok Song,
  • Hasan Onur Keles,
  • Hasan Onur Keles,
  • Laura Matloff,
  • Jordan Markel,
  • Utkan Demirci

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0017530
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 6, no. 3
p. e17530

Abstract

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Blood banking has a broad public health impact influencing millions of lives daily. It could potentially benefit from emerging biopreservation technologies. However, although vitrification has shown advantages over traditional cryopreservation techniques, it has not been incorporated into transfusion medicine mainly due to throughput challenges. Here, we present a scalable method that can vitrify red blood cells in microdroplets. This approach enables the vitrification of large volumes of blood in a short amount of time, and makes it a viable and scalable biotechnology tool for blood cryopreservation.