A collaborative group of researchers, led by University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus professor Angelo D’Alessandro, PhD, discovered kynurenine as a critical new biomarker in the quality of stored red blood cells (RBCs), which is an important step toward the development of more personalized transfusions.
Transfusion of red blood cells is one of the most common in-hospital medical treatments, second only to immunization. Altruistic blood donors are essential to the blood supply, and donated RBCs are kept in blood banks for up to 42 days before being transfused. Defining and describing the criteria for qualifying RBC storage is a poorly understood aspect of transfusion therapy, and the quality of preserved RBCs is important for a successful transfusion.
Time is an important consideration because the effectiveness of RBCs decreases with time. In a study published today in Blood, researchers investigated how variables such as donor age, gender, and BMI affect blood storage.
The findings show that blood with high amounts of kynurenine, a metabolite that plays an important role in immune response and is more commonly detected in persons with a high BMI, male donors, and older female donors, is a marker of fragility, which affects the cells’ vulnerability to rupture.
Blood with higher levels of kynurenine is more likely to degrade quickly. When researchers classified blood units based on the amounts of this new biomarker, they observed that donor characteristics influence blood quality just as much, if not more, than the length of time it was stored in the blood bank.