Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects (NSERC partnered)

Red blood cells circulate in the bloodstream for approximately 120 days, delivering oxygen to all tissues in the body. A key property of red blood cells is their ability to squeeze into capillary blood vessels that are many times smaller than their own diameter. Donated red blood cells, collected by the Canadian Blood Service for use in blood transfusions, can be stored for up to 42 days. During this time, the deformability of these cells is degraded, impairing their ability to circulate in capillary blood vessels. As a result, the viability of these cells in transfusion recipients is reduced from 120 days to, in some cases, hours or minutes. Currently, there are no simple methods to measure the quality of donated blood units, as defined by how long they will circulate in transfusion recipients. Additionally, there appears to be significant differences between donors, where some donors could provide blood that circulate longer in recipients than other donors. Our research team recently developed a method to analyze red blood cell deformability by sorting these cells based on their deformability in order to determine if the more deformable red blood cells circulate for longer in recipients than less deformable cells. We plan to use this approach to analyze donated red blood cells in order to estimate the expected circulation time of donated blood units. This capability would enable physicians to identify high-quality blood units in order to treat patients where a longer circulation time is critical, which would reduce the number of blood transfusions for these patients, and thus increase the overall blood supply. Additionally, the ability to estimate circulation time of individual donated blood units would allow Canadian Blood Service to improve their production and storage practices in order to improve the quality of blood provided to transfusion recipients.