Logan Soule on Blood Storage: Even Red Blood Cells Get a Sugar Crash

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Blood transfusions can be life-saving procedures for patients in need. However, they can also impart much more devastating complications, leading to poorer outcomes than prior to transfusion, such as infection, inflammation, and even death. This is in part due to the red blood cell “storage lesion”, which refers to the irreversible metabolic and physiological damages that occur to red blood cells (RBCs) during their storage period, such as membrane damage, protein/lipid oxidation, glycation, cell lysis, and many other detrimental changes vital to proper RBC function. Logan Soule is a 5th year PhD candidate in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Logan’s work focuses on attempts to alleviate the development of the storage lesion. His lab believes that a culprit behind these damages is the significantly high sugar content in RBC preservatives, which is 8x higher than diabetic patients. His work highlights the benefits of storing RBCs at physiological glucose levels, leading to exceptionally better RBC functionality than traditional hyperglycemic storage. However, normoglycemic storage requires “feeding” the cells with a concentrated glucose solution as the RBCs metabolize the glucose, limiting this technique’s application, until now. Logan has designed and implemented an automated glucose feeding device to successfully maintain normoglycemic conditions of stored RBCs. These findings implicate exciting changes in transfusion medicine that are more feasible than ever before. Storing blood under normoglycemic conditions is now not only possible but has significant potential to lead to better patient outcomes.

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