After decades of clinical failures and ethical controversy, could 2008 mark a new dawn for artificial blood? That’s the hope of HemoBioTech of Dallas, Texas, which claims to have developed a blood substitute that is safer than rival products. It plans to test the blood in surgical patients in India and the US later this year.
Like many previous blood substitutes designed to keep people alive when donor blood is unavailable, HemoTech is based on a form of oxygen-carrying haemoglobin extracted from cow blood, in which the haemoglobin molecules have been chemically bound together. This is necessary because free haemoglobin…
