Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren bog Obam here. For years, scientists have been toiling
Speaker 1: away in laboratories trying to make blood better, or maybe
Speaker 1: more accurately better for more people. That's one of the
Speaker 1: things that the Withers Research Group at the University of
Speaker 1: British Columbia is working on pretty much every day. You
Speaker 1: may know the basics of blood types. Humans have various kinds.
Speaker 1: If you need a transfusion, say you're injured in an accident,
Speaker 1: or you're in the operating room awaiting some procedure, you
Speaker 1: need the right type of blood, either A, B, A B,
Speaker 1: or O, and either positive or negative. You need either
Speaker 1: your exact blood type or type O negative, which is
Speaker 1: considered universal and acceptable by all. According to the American
Speaker 1: Red Cross, a blood transfusion is needed every two seconds
Speaker 1: in the United States, and every year four point five
Speaker 1: million lives are saved by safe transfusions. So Type OH
Speaker 1: is in high demand and and in short supply. So
Speaker 1: scientists have been fiddling with ways to convert Type A
Speaker 1: blood into Type OH that would solve a lot of
Speaker 1: supply and demand problems, and they're getting closer every day.
Speaker 1: For more than four years, the Wither's lab on the
Speaker 1: Vancouver campus of UBC has been just sciencing the heck
Speaker 1: out of the challenge. Researchers there have been experimenting with
Speaker 1: different approaches to strip certain sugar molecules from the surface
Speaker 1: of type A red blood cells, effectively turning the cells
Speaker 1: into Type O which do not contain those sugar molecules.
Speaker 1: These molecules, called antigens, are what makes transfusions of different
Speaker 1: types of blood problematic. Type B blood, for example, contains
Speaker 1: antibodies that will attack those sugars on Type A blood
Speaker 1: cells if the bloods mix and vice versa, but having
Speaker 1: no antigens, Type O blood is not attacked by other
Speaker 1: blood types antibodies, which is why Type O is in
Speaker 1: such great demand. The answer to ridding Type A blood
Speaker 1: of its antigens, first proposed and demonstrated in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: was to use an enzyme that would in effect eat
Speaker 1: those sugars. Wather's and his team building on that we're
Speaker 1: searching for a better enzyme, they turned inward. In a
Speaker 1: manner of speaking, they turned ultimately to the human gut.
Speaker 1: Wather's explained, what you're doing is you're essentially choosing an
Speaker 1: environment it's likely to contain enzymes to do the job
Speaker 1: you want, and then you try to isolate your genes
Speaker 1: and ultimately your enzymes from that environment. One of the
Speaker 1: key steps is, in my mind, is actually choosing your
Speaker 1: environment in the first place. Is it going to be
Speaker 1: a bunch of soil, some ocean water, what's it going
Speaker 1: to be. Wathers and his group considered places where blood
Speaker 1: and bacteria would come in contact, say in mosquitoes or
Speaker 1: vampire bats or leeches. Wathers said, but the complication is
Speaker 1: that it's only primates, that is, apes and ourselves that
Speaker 1: have the a BO blood system, So mosquitoes et cetera
Speaker 1: would have to be feeding on human blood, and none
Speaker 1: of my graduate students seemed keen to volunteer. The researchers
Speaker 1: settled on the human gut to the gastro intestinal walls,
Speaker 1: where bacteria have been found to feed on similar sugars.
Speaker 1: The theory was that they could take human DNA from
Speaker 1: a stool sample and isolate the genes that encode the
Speaker 1: bacteria to do their sugar eating thing in the gut.
Speaker 1: Then they could see if that bacteria would do the
Speaker 1: job on the sugars on type A blood cells, and
Speaker 1: fortunately for them, human poop is in relatively great abundance.
Speaker 1: After screening, cataloging, and sequencing the DNA, the researchers finally
Speaker 1: found a combination of enzymes that worked which effectively stripped
Speaker 1: the sugars from type A blood. Their findings were announced
Speaker 1: in June of twenty nineteen in the journal Nature Microbiology.
Speaker 1: Postdoc student Peter Rathfield, the lead author on the paper,
Speaker 1: said in a release, this will really drive forward the
Speaker 1: option for blood banks to manage the blood supply as
Speaker 1: soon as we can be sure it's safe. Testing to
Speaker 1: establish that the enzymes don't strip the blood of anything
Speaker 1: else and that the enzymes get all of the antigens
Speaker 1: from the surface of type A blood cells continues with
Speaker 1: He said, definitely, the research is still ongoing. One part
Speaker 1: is doing all these things on safety. The other part
Speaker 1: is trying to look further to see if there's even
Speaker 1: better enzymes, and also to look out for better enzymes
Speaker 1: for converting B type blood. We focused on A because
Speaker 1: that's the most challenging one before, and partly because there
Speaker 1: are reasonable enzymes for B. The Withers group also is
Speaker 1: perfecting new methods of screening DNA at a smaller volume.
Speaker 1: All of it, maybe soon could help make blood shortages
Speaker 1: a thing of the past. Today's episode was written by
Speaker 1: John Donovan and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For
Speaker 1: more in this and lots of other bloody awesome topics,
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