Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects

Managing the supplies of donated blood products (i.e. plasma, red cells, platelets) is an increasing challenge faced by bloodservice agencies the world over in part because, even under the best known storage conditions, these products steadilydegrade and different products age at different rates. Units of red blood cells (RBCs), for example, can only be stored for 42days 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 storedRBC that can be harmful to some patients upon transfusion. Importantly, blood from different donors ages differently, anddifferent patients exhibit different sensitivities to storage lesion present in transfused blood. Hence, for some units and/orsome patients, the 42-day window is actually too long. Yet significantly reducing the storage age limit raises the risk of RBCshortages as the number of discarded units due to outdate would rise considerably. What is badly needed is a way toseparate those units that are still suitable for transfusion from those units that should not be used. We propose to addressthis important need by developing an optical method based on Raman spectroscopy (RS) that would be able to assess thestate of stored blood rapidly and accurately, without needing to remove samples from the bag. The goals of the proposedresearch are: 1) to characterize RBC ageing in stored human blood using Raman spectroscopy; 2) to identify specificspectral markers for RBC storage lesion and correlate these markers with conventional biochemical assays; 3) to develop aturn-key, hand-held RS-based probe for nondestructively assessing the condition of stored RBC in situ within conventionalstorage bags. This project will yield new non-invasive sensing technology that will help ensure better and more uniformquality of transfused RBCs for Canadian patients.