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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff,

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Speaker 1: Lauren bog Obam here. For years, scientists have been toiling

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Speaker 1: away in laboratories trying to make blood better, or maybe

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Speaker 1: more accurately better for more people. That's one of the

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Speaker 1: things that the Withers Research Group at the University of

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Speaker 1: British Columbia is working on pretty much every day. You

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Speaker 1: may know the basics of blood types. Humans have various kinds.

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Speaker 1: If you need a transfusion, say you're injured in an accident,

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Speaker 1: or you're in the operating room awaiting some procedure, you

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Speaker 1: need the right type of blood, either A, B, A B,

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Speaker 1: or O, and either positive or negative. You need either

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Speaker 1: your exact blood type or type O negative, which is

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Speaker 1: considered universal and acceptable by all. According to the American

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Speaker 1: Red Cross, a blood transfusion is needed every two seconds

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Speaker 1: in the United States, and every year four point five

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Speaker 1: million lives are saved by safe transfusions. So Type OH

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Speaker 1: is in high demand and and in short supply. So

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Speaker 1: scientists have been fiddling with ways to convert Type A

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Speaker 1: blood into Type OH that would solve a lot of

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Speaker 1: supply and demand problems, and they're getting closer every day.

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Speaker 1: For more than four years, the Wither's lab on the

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Speaker 1: Vancouver campus of UBC has been just sciencing the heck

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Speaker 1: out of the challenge. Researchers there have been experimenting with

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Speaker 1: different approaches to strip certain sugar molecules from the surface

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Speaker 1: of type A red blood cells, effectively turning the cells

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Speaker 1: into Type O which do not contain those sugar molecules.

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Speaker 1: These molecules, called antigens, are what makes transfusions of different

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Speaker 1: types of blood problematic. Type B blood, for example, contains

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Speaker 1: antibodies that will attack those sugars on Type A blood

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Speaker 1: cells if the bloods mix and vice versa, but having

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Speaker 1: no antigens, Type O blood is not attacked by other

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Speaker 1: blood types antibodies, which is why Type O is in

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Speaker 1: such great demand. The answer to ridding Type A blood

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Speaker 1: of its antigens, first proposed and demonstrated in the nineteen eighties,

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Speaker 1: was to use an enzyme that would in effect eat

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Speaker 1: those sugars. Wather's and his team building on that we're

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Speaker 1: searching for a better enzyme, they turned inward. In a

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Speaker 1: manner of speaking, they turned ultimately to the human gut.

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Speaker 1: Wather's explained, what you're doing is you're essentially choosing an

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Speaker 1: environment it's likely to contain enzymes to do the job

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Speaker 1: you want, and then you try to isolate your genes

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Speaker 1: and ultimately your enzymes from that environment. One of the

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Speaker 1: key steps is, in my mind, is actually choosing your

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Speaker 1: environment in the first place. Is it going to be

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Speaker 1: a bunch of soil, some ocean water, what's it going

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Speaker 1: to be. Wathers and his group considered places where blood

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Speaker 1: and bacteria would come in contact, say in mosquitoes or

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Speaker 1: vampire bats or leeches. Wathers said, but the complication is

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Speaker 1: that it's only primates, that is, apes and ourselves that

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Speaker 1: have the a BO blood system, So mosquitoes et cetera

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Speaker 1: would have to be feeding on human blood, and none

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Speaker 1: of my graduate students seemed keen to volunteer. The researchers

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Speaker 1: settled on the human gut to the gastro intestinal walls,

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Speaker 1: where bacteria have been found to feed on similar sugars.

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Speaker 1: The theory was that they could take human DNA from

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Speaker 1: a stool sample and isolate the genes that encode the

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Speaker 1: bacteria to do their sugar eating thing in the gut.

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Speaker 1: Then they could see if that bacteria would do the

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Speaker 1: job on the sugars on type A blood cells, and

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Speaker 1: fortunately for them, human poop is in relatively great abundance.

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Speaker 1: After screening, cataloging, and sequencing the DNA, the researchers finally

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Speaker 1: found a combination of enzymes that worked which effectively stripped

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Speaker 1: the sugars from type A blood. Their findings were announced

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Speaker 1: in June of twenty nineteen in the journal Nature Microbiology.

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Speaker 1: Postdoc student Peter Rathfield, the lead author on the paper,

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Speaker 1: said in a release, this will really drive forward the

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Speaker 1: option for blood banks to manage the blood supply as

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Speaker 1: soon as we can be sure it's safe. Testing to

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Speaker 1: establish that the enzymes don't strip the blood of anything

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Speaker 1: else and that the enzymes get all of the antigens

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Speaker 1: from the surface of type A blood cells continues with

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Speaker 1: He said, definitely, the research is still ongoing. One part

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Speaker 1: is doing all these things on safety. The other part

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Speaker 1: is trying to look further to see if there's even

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Speaker 1: better enzymes, and also to look out for better enzymes

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Speaker 1: for converting B type blood. We focused on A because

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Speaker 1: that's the most challenging one before, and partly because there

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Speaker 1: are reasonable enzymes for B. The Withers group also is

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Speaker 1: perfecting new methods of screening DNA at a smaller volume.

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Speaker 1: All of it, maybe soon could help make blood shortages

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Speaker 1: a thing of the past. Today's episode was written by

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Speaker 1: John Donovan and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is

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Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For

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Speaker 1: more in this and lots of other bloody awesome topics,

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Speaker 1: visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com and

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