Kenneth M

Red Blood Cell (RBC) transfusion is a common medical procedure, which most often involves stored RBC units. During storage, RBC quality degrades due to various factors (“storage lesion”). This decreases cell viability in-vivo and thus often compromises transfusion efficacy. The degradation of any given unit of RBC solution varies according to several factors besides time (e.g., variability among donors’ average RBC age, postcollection storage/handling conditions), rendering the current metric of time alone a poor proxy by which to estimate degradation. There is not yet a clinically available or feasibly adoptable test for measuring actual degradation in any individual unit of blood product. Current FDA regulations do call for 75% of RBC to survive post-transfusion, but even compliance with this standard cannot be reliably assessed.