New technology turns A and B blood to O

If you think back to high school biology, you will recall how blood types operate: type A can only be given to those with A and AB, B only to B and AB, while O is the so-called universal donor. These rules, however, may have to be modified. Beverly, Massachusetts-based ZymeQuest is hard at work on a method of turning A and B blood into O by “cleaving identifying sugars from the surface of red blood cells,” Technology Review reports. (These sugars form antigens that trigger an immune response when the wrong blood type is presented.) The company is currently developing a machine that can treat eight units of blood in ninety minutes and, if ongoing phase II clinical trials prove out, it is expected to reach the European market in 2011.

Not that the idea is entirely original; other researchers have developed enzyming-cleaving systems. But according to Henrik Clausen of the University of Copenhagen, those attempts relied on enzymes found in simple sugars. “We used real substrates from red blood cells,” he said. “You have to use these complex, branched sugars to search for enzymes with much better properties.”