Bhabisara’s blood is so rare, most people have never heard of it. Soon it could be grown in this Brisbane lab

Bhabisara Gharti Magar has a blood type few people have ever heard of.

In fact, the young mum only learnt she had one of the world’s rarest blood types – a subset of the Bombay blood group called Para-Bombay – when she started planning to have children.

During her pregnancy, doctors warned Gharti Magar they would need to prepare her own blood in advance, in case she needed it during childbirth.

“I was advised to collect at least three bags through autologous blood donation,” she explains.

“Thankfully, I did not end up haemorrhaging [during birth] and I didn’t need any of my stored blood.”

For people with extremely rare blood types, finding suitable donors and blood supply can be incredibly challenging. Experts from The University of Queensland and the Australian Red Cross Lifeblood are hoping to change this, with a new partnership aimed at scaling lab-grown blood to support people with unique transfusion needs.

UQ biomedical engineer Dr Mark Allenby says scientists can already grow fully functional red blood cells in laboratories, but the process is prohibitively expensive and labour-intensive in its current form.

“You need a trillion red blood cells [to produce a blood bag], and to be able to do that in the laboratory, you need something equivalent to like a tennis court filled with cell culture flasks,” he says. (“Flasks” provide the nutrient environment, or growth factors, to grow the blood.)

“Here in engineering land … we’re not trying to deliver a new biological thing that hasn’t been discovered before.

“We’re trying to create a scaffolding for cells to grow at high density … with less nutrient costs.”

It currently takes about three weeks and costs more than $70,000 to grow a few teaspoons of red blood cells.

“The way we grow them is still kind of like an old-fashioned Nokia phone,” Lifeblood researcher Dr Becky Griffiths says.

“We need to be more advanced in the way we do it, using technology that is more like a smartphone.”

Griffiths has been working on lab-grown blood for nearly 25 years and helped design the protocols for the world’s first human clinical trial in the UK to compare the benefits of lab grown and donated blood.

“A red cell has a 120-day lifespan, so when you donate red cells, you’re getting all different ages,” she says.

“If you think of it like a punnet of strawberries, you’ve got some really fresh ones and some not quite fresh ones.

“But what we’re creating in the lab is a brand new red cell each time … so the clinical trial is to test if, firstly, they’re safe to go into people, and secondly … [if they’re] more effective.”

SMART CRC, an Australian company specialising in the development and scaling of regenerative therapies, has invested $2.5 million in the collaborative project.

Lifeblood stresses that advancing the production of lab-grown blood will not replace the ongoing need for blood donations. Rather it could improve healthcare for a small but important segment of the population: people with extremely rare blood types like Gharti Magar’s; babies needing neo-natal blood; and patients who undergo frequent transfusions throughout their life.

“Having Bombay blood has always meant knowing that finding compatible blood in an emergency can be extremely difficult,” Gharti Magar says.

“Knowing there could one day be a way to grow compatible blood in a laboratory would give people like me enormous reassurance.”

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.