Our goals
- the understanding of the impact of donors’ characteristics, collection, processes and storage on blood products at molecular and cellular levels,
- the development of new tools to study lesions and to base our research on innovative and modern strategies (omics science, system biology, new instruments),
- the technology transfer to other services such as production or quality control,
- the communication to physicians and blood bankers on potential lesions and their impact.
Projects
The Blood Products Research Laboratory is mainly working on the biochemistry and biology of blood cells in the context of transfusion medicine. The two major topics are the platelets and the red blood cells. A few projects are cited here.
Contact
BioCAP: Biotin-labelled platelets for in vitro and in vivo characterization of platelet functions: cold storage and aging of platelet concentrates
The aim of BioCAP is to provide new tools to better characterize platelet function both in vitro and in vivo and to address the question of in vivo platelet life span and functionality according to different pre-transfusion storage conditions and platelet aging. This is an ambitious research project to improve the transfusion of platelets. The long-term objective is to lay the ground for successfully carry out clinical trials with transfusion of heterologous biotin-labelled platelet concentrates.
This work is done in collaboration with CHUV.
PhosphoRBC: Red blood cell aging and protein phosphorylation
In the context of transfusion medicine, red blood cells exhibit some modifications during the storage, the so-called storage lesions, that alter the cell functions. Protein phosphorylation is one of these alterations. This post-translational modification regulates enzymatic activity, modulates protein-protein interactions and influences cytoskeleton and membrane proteins links. This project has the objective of deeply investigating the role of phosphorylation mechanisms in human stored red blood cells using the approaches that have been put in place in our laboratory.
In vitro transfusion model
The model of in vitro transfusion enables to study the effect of donors and red blood cell aging in presence of plasma and simulate the transfusion. As a first approach, the model was developed with healthy red blood cells, which enables to characterize the effects of storage. It has been also applied to evaluate the effect of donors’ sex in simulations of transfusion. The current aim of this project is to further investigate the behaviour of red blood cells in different pathophysiological conditions.
The current phase of this work is done in collaboration with CHUV.
Hemochromatosis and blood donation
Iron overload in hereditary hemochromatosis is treated by phlebotomy. It is unclear, if individuals with hyperferritinemia due to hereditary hemochromatosis or to secondary causes are suitable as blood donors. The study investigates haemolysis and several other quality parameters of red blood cell concentrates prepared from whole blood given by patients with hemochromatosis.
This work is done in a collaboration with our medicine and blood collection departments and the Regional Blood Transfusion Service in Basel.