Blood transfusions save millions of lives.  Trauma victims or surgery patients who lose significant amounts of blood need replacements to have a decent chance of survival.  There’s just one problem.  It’s got to be the right blood.  As outlined in a 1999 review, transfusing the wrong blood can be deadly.  It doesn’t happen often, but Read More

For as much as medical science has progressed in the last decades, units of donated blood used today have the same six-week shelflife in the blood bank refrigerator as they had in World War I. Alternative methods have been tried to extend the lifetime of donated blood and ease the logistical burden on blood banks. Read More

This is another of the articles we’ve run across that go into the “how we got here” category.  This one is a 1948 article on the preservation of vascular segments for later transplant.  The article evaluated six different methods of storage, specifically looking at their viability in tissue culture.  They found that placing the segments Read More

Stem cell therapy holds a lot of promise, but that promise will only be realized if the grunt work is done: careful investigation of the factors that make stem cell grafts effective or ineffective.  That’s the kind of work you’ll find in a 2010 report from a multi-institution team of Mexican medical researchers.  They investigated Read More