Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects (NSERC partnered)

Managing the supplies of donated blood products (i.e. plasma, red cells, platelets) is an increasing challenge faced by blood service agencies the world over in part because, even under the best known storage conditions, these products steadily degrade and different products age at different rates. Units of red blood cells (RBCs), for example, can only be stored for 42 days before they are considered unusable. The accumulated degradation that begins immediately upon collection is called "storage lesion" which refers to the effects of an ensemble of chemical, physiological and morphological changes in stored RBC that can be harmful to some patients upon transfusion. Importantly, blood from different donors ages differently, and different patients exhibit different sensitivities to storage lesion present in transfused blood. Hence, for some units and/or some patients, the 42-day window is actually too long. Yet significantly reducing the storage age limit raises the risk of RBC shortages as the number of discarded units due to outdate would rise considerably. What is badly needed is a way to separate those units that are still suitable for transfusion from those units that should not be used. We propose to address this important need by developing an optical method based on Raman spectroscopy (RS) that would be able to assess the state of stored blood rapidly and accurately, without needing to remove samples from the bag. The goals of the proposed research are: 1) to characterize RBC ageing in stored human blood using Raman spectroscopy; 2) to identify specific spectral markers for RBC storage lesion and correlate these markers with conventional biochemical assays; 3) to develop a turn-key, hand-held RS-based probe for nondestructively assessing the condition of stored RBC in situ within conventional storage bags. This project will yield new non-invasive sensing technology that will help ensure better and more uniform quality of transfused RBCs for Canadian patients.