Substitute Would Get Wide Use

Asuccessful blood substitute would be free of disease and toxic compounds, plentiful, with a shelf-life of perhaps a year and would not provoke immune responses, so it could be used by anyone, regardless of blood type.

In a trauma situation, it could be pulled out of the back of an ambulance and immediately injected into accident victims or wounded soldiers on the front lines, buying time until they could be moved to a medical facility, properly blood-typed and given a normal transfusion of donated blood. Emergency medics now use saline solution for this purpose.

In the hospital, doctors foresee using a temporary hemoglobin substitute in conjunction with autologous blood donation, in which a patient stores several units of his own blood before surgery. Infused with a substitute during the operation, the patient would receive his own blood back afterward, having shed less “real blood” on the operating table. Or the blood substitute could used post-operatively to prevent anemia.