Finding could stem future blood supply woes

A research team at Tongji Hospital in Hubei province has developed a breakthrough technology capable of mass-producing human platelets outside the human body, using a process similar to large-scale farming. The innovation could help ease future blood supply shortages.

Led by Fang Minghao, deputy director of the hospital's emergency medicine teaching and research unit, the team developed a highly precise device that mimics the human blood circulation environment, allowing platelets to separate from megakaryocytes, the cells responsible for producing them.

Platelets are a critical component of blood. When blood vessels or tissues are damaged, they act like emergency patches, helping the body stop bleeding. They are widely used in life-threatening situations, including severe postpartum hemorrhage, cardiac surgery and major trauma.

According to an article posted by China's National Health Commission, platelets are among the most difficult blood components to preserve. They can only be stored for about five days after donation and require strict storage conditions.

Fang said the technology could provide a new solution to the growing challenges in maintaining platelet supplies. "Stable blood supplies are becoming increasingly difficult to sustain," Fang said. "As the population ages, the number of healthy donors continues to decline. Many people over 60 develop age-related health conditions and are no longer eligible to donate blood. Donation-based supplies are likely to shrink further in the future."

Meanwhile, demand for blood products in surgeries and critical care is expected to remain steady or increase, he added. Global research efforts into lab-grown platelets have made progress in recent years, but clinical applications remain limited, Fang said. Most studies have focused on rare diseases or specific medical conditions and an industrial-scale production system has yet to be established.

The breakthrough grew out of the team's research into liver physiology. While studying how to grow liver tissue in vitro, researchers discovered that isolated liver tissue could produce more platelets than expected. The finding, made around 2024, prompted the team to investigate large-scale platelet production.

"We can take a small number of skin or oral mucosal cells from a person and use them as the 'seeds' for platelet production," Fang said.

The researchers first convert these cells into induced pluripotent stem cells, which can develop into many types of human cells. They then guide the stem cells to become megakaryocytes, the platelet-producing cells found in the human body. The team has proposed two potential applications. The first is an industrial production model, similar to agricultural cultivation, where platelets could be grown and harvested on a large scale. The second is a personalized treatment approach for patients with inherited platelet production disorders. By infusing megakaryocytes directly into patients, the body could potentially generate its own platelets, reducing immune rejection risks.

Fang said producing platelets at a laboratory scale is no longer the biggest challenge. The key obstacle is transforming the technology into a commercial product. Building a prototype production device requires millions of yuan in investment, making industrialization a key challenge. "We have already achieved large-scale platelet production under laboratory conditions," said Shao Lihua, the project's biomedical research leader, in an interview with local media. "But moving toward industrial production requires expanding the microfluidic bioreactor into a larger prototype for testing and pilot manufacturing. It is like upgrading a home computer into a high-performance computing center."