HAMILTON, Ontario, Nov. 8 (UPI) -- Researchers at McMaster University in Ontario say they have discovered how to make human blood from adult human skin.
Mick Bhatia, scientific director of McMaster's Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute in the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine, and his team say making blood from skin does not require the middle step of changing a skin stem cell into a pluripotent stem cell that could make many other types of human cells, then turning it into a blood stem cell.
The study, published the journal Nature, says in the foreseeable future people needing blood for surgery, cancer treatment or for conditions like anemia may be able to have blood created from a patch of their own skin to provide transfusions.
"We have shown this works using human skin. We know how it works and believe we can even improve on the process," Bhatia says in a statement. "We'll now go on to work on developing other types of human cell types from skin, as we already have encouraging evidence."
The researchers have replicated several times using human skin from both young and old people, the study says.
"Producing blood from a patient's own skin cells, has the potential of making bone marrow transplant Human Leukocyte Antigens matching and paucity of donors a thing of the past," Alain Beaudet, president of the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, says.
