Comment by api_or_ipa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api_or_ipa | Hacker News Reader

This could be a revolutionary innovation, just from the perspective of blood logistics. In a perfect world, we'd all stock up on just O-negative blood and use it everywhere but blood supplies are a scarce resource and we have to use what we have so getting all responders to only carry O-negative just won't scale. Imagine removing the tough question about what blood to use: do we use the precious O-negative or do we carry a bit of everything and first test the patient for what can work? By having a relatively plentiful universal supply, we could reduce the amount of carried blood, decrease spoilage and decrease the time it takes to get the patient the blood she/he needs. All these benefits would be massively beneficial in improving patient outcomes, decrease cost and streamline logistics, especially in the field where space is at a premium.

It's obviously early stage, but I'd absolutely love to see the Canadian Blood Service invest in lots of follow up studies to see how we can scale this technology.

Also, it's always great to see my alma mater on HN :)

> do we use the precious O-negative or do we carry a bit of everything and first test the patient for what can work?

Type O- is rare because being rhesus-negative is rare, but type O+ is quite common.

Indeed, I am O+ myself

Rhesus negative had the problem of birth issues when their mothers had born rhesus positive elder siblings sadly.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemolytic_disease_of_the_new...

In some places, like where I live, rhesus-negative is very rare, 0.2% of the population for O- and B-, 0.1% for A-. It is usually tourists who need the blood and the blood banks just don't have it. So we often see calls go out for blood donors when a tourist has a serious injury. If this method to convert blood works it would be very beneficial.

> In a perfect world, we'd all stock up on just O-negative blood and use it everywhere

Are there any advantages of using blood with the patient's specific antigen type over plain O-negative? Perhaps keeping all blood types available might still be a good idea in a hospital setting.

Plasma compatibility goes in reverse (AB is universal).

And there are lots of other less important blood factors. In most situations the donor blood is cross matched with the patient's blood, to directly test compatibility.

https://www.healthline.com/health/blood-typing-and-crossmatc...

Interesting! Thanks

... never mind the venerable Vancouver Sun - not exactly the first place I look for news like this.

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