Re:By growing cells in unrealistic liquids, scientists may h...
by pvaldes on Thursday January 03, 2019 @01:14PM
(#18817478)
Working with human blood introduces also a non negligible risk for the workers. You can't pick hepatitis from a zebra fish.
Re:By growing cells in unrealistic liquids, scientists may h...
by chmod775 on Thursday January 03, 2019 @11:18AM
(#18816198)
> Human blood is limited in availability, and would be phenomenally expensive
Just wait until researchers realize where to obtain human blood for free...
You're looking awfully pale today Steven!
Re:By growing cells in unrealistic liquids, scientists may h...
by jonlucc on Thursday January 03, 2019 @01:54PM
(#18817970)
You joke, but I work in a pharmaceutical company, and we have a program specifically for employees to donate blood for research purposes. It's complicated so that the donors and researchers are blinded to where the blood comes from and who it goes to.
It's also still rather unrealistic. Most cells aren't directly exposed to blood plasma and all of its proteins. They are perfused by interstitial fluid which is blood plasma filtered through the capillaries.
One of the goals of some of the more modern media (as in this article) is to supplement every known necessary component of blood plasma to avoid the need for any animal-derived sera, and to make the media completely defined and standardised. This isn't new; people were doing this over a decade back when I was working on my PhD. However, the number of components in blood plasma makes this difficult, if not intractable. Most of these new media had a small amount of FBS (≤1%) to make up for the unknown components. That notwithstanding, the efforts to better understand the exact requirements are laudable. However, proving that all the needed components are present and in the correct concentrations is difficult if not impossible, since it might appear to work while causing some subtle physiological change. We might have to settle for "appears to be good enough for all common cell types". But even that would be a huge improvement upon the status quo.