Lab-grown blood offers hope for Queensland family with ultra-rare blood type

A family from Logan, south of Brisbane, with an ultra-rare blood type is pinning their hopes on groundbreaking research into lab-grown blood. The Fa'agase family, including 32-year-old Joe, have a blood type so rare that only 14 Australians have it.

Joe and his three brothers have the extremely rare blood type called Jk null, found in less than 1 per cent of the Pacific Islander community. They only discovered their unusual blood type a few years ago when their aunt, Noa Fa'agase, fell ill and required transfusions.

At the time, Lifeblood had no supplies of Jk null blood, prompting a national call-out for donations. "While we were testing … they were actually looking at trying to get the blood from Hawaii," Joe recalled.

The struggle to supply blood for people with rare types, like Joe, has sparked calls for more Australians of mixed heritage to donate. Currently, just 3 per cent of the population donates blood. This challenge has also driven new research into creating laboratory-grown blood at scale for future use in such patients.

Lifeblood scientists can already grow fully functional red blood cells from donor stem cells in the lab for research purposes. However, it takes three weeks to produce a teaspoonful, and the process is prohibitively expensive, costing about $1 million per unit of lab-grown blood.

A new $2.5 million research project over four years, developed through the Solutions and Manufacturing Advanced Regenerative Therapies Co-operative Research Centre (SMART CRC), aims to explore new manufacturing techniques to increase production and reduce costs. The collaboration is between the University of Queensland and Lifeblood.

Lifeblood researcher Becky Griffiths said lab-grown blood would never replace human donations but could save lives by producing red blood cells for people with ultra-rare blood types. "Australia is one of the few countries that can produce lab-grown red blood cells and it's using the same protocols that were developed in the UK," Dr Griffiths said.

Her hope is that within four years, they will be able to produce bigger yields of lab-grown blood at a reasonable cost that could then be tested in clinical trials.

UQ biomedical engineer Dr Mark Allenby said existing processes for producing small doses of lab-grown red blood cells relied on expensive reagents and complicated manual techniques. "If you want this to become a therapy, that could reach patients … we would need to be able to grow more red blood cells more cheaply and that's where this project comes in," he said.

For the Fa'agase brothers, having lab-grown blood available could be a lifesaver. Three units of Joe's blood are kept on ice in a rare blood bank in Sydney, but in extreme emergencies, the brothers would have to donate to each other. "Somebody could accidentally get into a car accident tomorrow and then we'd have to be the donations because we can't accept other blood donations from anybody else," Joe said.

Joe admits the situation sometimes leaves him "a little bit scared", but he's "excited" about the research, acknowledging it is still in its early days. "It gives a reassurance that we will be okay, that we don't have to just rely on each other. There's going to be another alternative," he said.