Hematopoiesis
Introduction
One of the main tasks of Sanquin Blood Supply is to supply hospitals with units of packed red cells. To guarantee future availability of erythrocytes for all patients that require transfusions we aim to generate erythrocytes in vitro to obtain a degree of donor independency and to eliminate donor-patient blood type variations and a more quality controlled product. This may be of particular interest for patients with rare blood group antigens that require recurrent transfusions. The ultimate goal is to culture erythrocytes from immortal induced pluripotent stem cells (IPS) or immortal pro-erythroblasts, providing a tool to generate specific low immunogenic erythrocytes of constant quality. As such we entertain three complementary research topics in the laboratory:
- Differentiation of erythroblasts to erythrocytes;
- Regulating Globin expression during fetal and adult erythropoiesis;
- From IPS to erythroblasts to erythrocytes
Funding:
- PPOC, internal funding (in competition)
- LSBR
