It may sound like a Halloween prank, but the Balkan News Agency claims that a team of scientists in a Transylvanian university has created artificial blood. The researchers say that they have successfully tried it on mice. If human tests work, this could be one of the biggest breakthroughs in modern medicine.
Scientists have been trying to create artificial blood for decades but always failed. There are substances called “non-blood volume expanders for cases where only volume restoration is required” but “no oxygen-carrying blood substitutes.” The blood invented by professor Radu Silaghi-Dumitrescu and his the team of scientists at the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca carries oxygen. It just works like real blood.
Since it’s Halloween, it seems surprising that the announcement comes from the university at Cluj-Napoca, the second largest city in Romania and “the unofficial capital of the historical province of Transylvania.” That’s where Vlad Dracul, the inspiration for the legends of Dracula and all the vampiric lore, was born. But the discovery was actually announced a week ago—the University is real and professor Silaghi-Dumitrescu (below) is a respected scientist with plenty of published science papers.
According to Silaghi-Dumitrescuto, the mice who received this artificial blood didn’t experience any negative symptoms at all. It just worked. The professor explained that “all the previous attempts to create artificial blood have failed because researchers couldn’t find the right protein to keep the substance immune to stress factors.”
Test on mice will continue until they have complete certainty that there are no secondary effects, says the professor: “Tests on humans are a very delicate topic, we need some very serious licenses and they represent an enormous risk.”
Top image by Shutterstock
