[cookieswumchorr]

the application i immediately thought about is disaster medicine.

This is when you need huge amounts of blood, and my guess is that it can be less perfect, when there is simply no other choice to save lives.

An inferior substitute is better than nothing

[kibwen]

I think it might be the opposite, actually. In a disaster, when you need a sudden surge of supply, you're not going to have time to scale up your production. Even if we had reliable supplies of synthetic blood, I think disasters are always going to call for mass donations from the old-fashioned blood producers.

[Forgeties79]

> I think disasters are always going to call for mass donations from the old-fashioned blood producers.

Maybe I’m parroting an incorrect bar top factoid, but isn’t it usually the case that they need the blood before the disaster? That when events like 9/11 occur and people rush to donate blood, it’s not actually going to do much for the immediate problem?

[ebiester]

Yes and no. It won't do much for the immediate problem, but you're about to go through a lot more blood and will need to replenish the stores.

[tyre]

With 9/11 specifically it didn’t do much for the immediate problem because there wasn’t much need for blood. People crushed under the weight of the towers weren’t bleeding out, they were just dead.

[est31]

What about coagulation? It is needed in situations where you have acute blood loss, and plasma contains the coagulation factors. You already probably want to give your patient coagulants in such a situation but I don't know if those are enough on their own or they need cooperation from existing factors in the plasma.

[Cthulhu_]

That's also where blood plasma comes in, which can be donated once a month (as opposed to blood which is only a few times a year).

I mean if this can be scaled up to producing gallons an hour in the field then sure, but we're a ways away from that still.

[6stringmerc]

Yeah field work sounds great for this! Stabilize then treat. Good observation.