A team of scientists from the University of Bristol and NHS Blood and Transplant announced a recent breakthrough that makes it possible to mass produce red blood cells. Published in scientific journal Nature, this newly discovered stem cell technique opens the door for the future wide-scale use of manufactured blood. It could be particularly useful for people with rare blood groups, which are difficult to match with the existing pool of donated blood.
Manufacturing red blood cells in the lab is a proven technique, but the yield is often low. Using existing cell culture methods, each laboratory-harvested stem cell is capable of producing up to 50,000 red blood cells before it expires. This is a drop in the bucket compared to a bag of blood which contains a trillion red blood cells.
This newly developed technique captures the stem cells at an early stage when they are multiplying rapidly. Scientists were able to induce these early stem cells to make red blood cells at an incredible rate. “We have demonstrated a feasible way to sustainably manufacture red cells for clinical use,” said researcher Dr Jan Frayne to the BBC. “We’ve grown liters of it.”
The researchers may have discovered a biological key that opens the door to mass producing red blood cells, but that is only part of the equation. They also have to figure out how to industrialize the process, so it’s cost-effective and yields a suitable product. Researchers plan to conduct safety trials of the lab-grown blood later this year.
Besides safety, cost also may be a hindrance to the use of cultured red blood cells in the general population. The manufactured red blood cells will be much more expensive to use than the donated cells. NHS Blood and Transplant confirms they have no plans to stop using donated blood despite this breakthrough. This manufactured blood instead may be reserved for recipients whose blood types make it difficult to match with a donor.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.