Chinese University of Science and Technology researchers have made important progress in the production of red blood cells in vitro

The amount of blood donated in China is increasing, but the supply is still in short supply
.

At present, red blood cells and other blood products are mainly derived from peripheral blood donation from volunteers .

 

Recently, the research group and cooperative team led by Professor Cheng Linzhao from the Department of Life Science and Medicine of USTC published a research paper entitled "BMI1 enables extensive expansion of functional erythroblasts from human peripheral blood mononuclear cells " on Molecular Therapy [ 1] .

MolecularTharapy is a journal of the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy (ASGCT ) and a sub-journal of Cell Press .
In this study, an experimental system was established for massively amplifying erythroid progenitor cells from human peripheral blood mononuclear cells and efficiently inducing differentiation into mature red blood cells, and using a mouse blood transfusion model to verify the function of red blood cells produced by the system .

 

To address the limited ability of erythroid progenitor cells to expand in vitro, this study first enriched CD235a + erythroid progenitor cells from peripheral blood mononuclear cells of healthy donors, and analyzed the details of cells expanded in vitro for different days ^.
Analysis showed that erythroid progenitor cells could not maintain a state of self-renewal for a long time, and rapidly differentiated to terminal, followed by apoptosis
.

The results of high-throughput sequencing showed that with the differentiation and maturation of erythroid progenitor cells in vitro, the expression of B MI1 gene was rapidly down-regulated.
It was speculated that B MI1 played an important role in the expansion and self-renewal of erythroid progenitor cells in vitro

In conclusion, this study established for the first time a culture system for in vitro large-scale expansion and efficient denucleation of human peripheral blood-derived erythroid progenitor cells, which is expected to solve the worldwide problem of red blood cell shortage
.

Prof.
Cheng Linzhao, Prof.
Chen Tong from Huashan Hospital Affiliated to Fudan University, and Prof.
JohnR.
Roback from Emory University are the co-corresponding authors of the paper.
an author .
This research was funded by USTC , Fudan University, Johns Hopkins University, and Emory University .

 

In addition, Dr.

Senquan Liu, who joined the University of Science and Technology of China in 2020, was recently awarded the only Young Investigator Award in 2020 by the internationally renowned stem cell journal STEM CELLS [ 3]

This research was funded by the Research Department of the Department of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China .

Article link:

[1] https:// class="MsoNormal" >[2] https://mp.

weixin.
qq.

[3] https://stemcellsjournals.

 

Department of Life Sciences and Medicine, Department of Scientific Research of HKUST