Japan to Begin Clinical Trials for Artificial Blood This Year

credit – Adrian Sulyok on Unsplash

Japan is the first country to begin clinical trials of artificial blood, a medical innovation which if proven successful, would solve one of the largest hospital challenges of our age.

Beginning back in March, a clinical trial organized by Nara Medical University will look to build on the success of an early-stage trial in 2022 of hemoglobin vesicles, small artificial blood cells that were confirmed to be safe and capable of delivering oxygen as normal.

The trial will administer 100 to 400 milliliters of the artificial blood cells to further test safety before moving onto broader performance and efficacy targets, all in the hopes that by 2030, the artificial blood could enter clinical use.

Whether high-income or low-income, every country has challenges meeting the necessity necessary amounts of stockpiled blood donations for emergency medical procedures.

In high-income countries where the 90% of blood stockpiles comes from voluntary donors, the challenge is getting enough of these donations, and crucially, enough from those with rare blood types.

In low-income countries where only 40% of needs are met with donations, the challenge lies in importation from abroad when donated blood packs are only safe for use for a few months. A useful proxy to understanding this shortfall is that of 175 countries included in a survey of blood donation and use practices by the World Health Organization, 106 countries report that all blood plasma-derived products are imported. These include things like immunoglobulins and coagulation factors which are needed to prevent and treat a variety of serious conditions.

Japan has a different challenge. The WHO found that the use of donated blood varied with income levels, reporting that high-income countries used more blood donations to treat those aged 65 and older, while lower-income countries used it to treat those aged 5 and under.

Japan has recognized that its long-since-collapsed replacement birth rate coupled with long life-expectancy will place a likely unsustainable burden of blood donation on a shrinking working-age population, making artificial blood a priority innovation.

Professor Hiromi Sakai at Nara Medical University has pioneered one method for its synthesis. Using hemoglobin—the oxygen carrying molecule inside red blood cells—from expired donations and encasing them in protective shells, removing the need of matching blood type for administration.

Another method comes from Chuo University where the hemoglobin is encased in an albumin-family protein, which has been used in animal studies to stabilize blood pressure and treat conditions like hemorrhage and stroke.Either way, the necessity is there and it’s urgent for Japan and the world. If the country’s researchers succeed in this innovation, it will be a medical milestone of epic proportions. Japan to Begin Clinical Trials for Artificial Blood This Year

Read More........→May 29, 2025

Australian researchers use a quantum computer to simulate how real molecules behave

Ivan Kassal, University of Sydney and Tingrei Tan, University of Sydney

When a molecule absorbs light, it undergoes a whirlwind of quantum-mechanical transformations. Electrons jump between energy levels, atoms vibrate, and chemical bonds shift — all within millionths of a billionth of a second.

These processes underpin everything from photosynthesis in plants and DNA damage from sunlight, to the operation of solar cells and light-powered cancer therapies.

Yet despite their importance, chemical processes driven by light are difficult to simulate accurately. Traditional computers struggle, because it takes vast computational power to simulate this quantum behaviour.

Quantum computers, by contrast, are themselves quantum systems — so quantum behaviour comes naturally. This makes quantum computers natural candidates for simulating chemistry.

Until now, quantum devices have only been able to calculate unchanging things, such as the energies of molecules. Our study, published this week in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, demonstrates we can also model how those molecules change over time.

We experimentally simulated how specific real molecules behave after absorbing light.

Simulating reality with a single ion

We used what is called a trapped-ion quantum computer. This works by manipulating individual atoms in a vacuum chamber, held in place with electromagnetic fields.

Normally, quantum computers store information using quantum bits, or qubits. However, to simulate the behaviour of the molecules, we also used vibrations of the atoms in the computer called “bosonic modes”.

This technique is called mixed qudit-boson simulation. It dramatically reduces how big a quantum computer you need to simulate a molecule.

We simulated the behaviour of three molecules absorbing light: allene, butatriene, and pyrazine. Each molecule features complex electronic and vibrational interactions after absorbing light, making them ideal test cases.

Our simulation, which used a laser and a single atom in the quantum computer, slowed these processes down by a factor of 100 billion. In the real world, the interactions take femtoseconds, but our simulation of them played out in milliseconds – slow enough for us to see what happened.

A million times more efficient

What makes our experiment particularly significant is the size of the quantum computer we used.

Performing the same simulation with a traditional quantum computer (without using bosonic modes) would require 11 qubits, and to carry out roughly 300,000 “entangling” operations without errors. This is well beyond the reach of current technology.

By contrast, our approach accomplished the task by zapping a single trapped ion with a single laser pulse. We estimate our method is at least a million times more resource-efficient than standard quantum approaches.

We also simulated “open-system” dynamics, where the molecule interacts with its environment. This is typically a much harder problem for classical computers.

By injecting controlled noise into the ion’s environment, we replicated how real molecules lose energy. This showed environmental complexity can also be captured by quantum simulation.

What’s next?

This work is an important step forward for quantum chemistry. Even though current quantum computers are still limited in scale, our methods show that small, well-designed experiments can already tackle problems of real scientific interest.

Simulating the real-world behaviour of atoms and molecules is a key goal of quantum chemistry. It will make it easier to understand the properties of different materials, and may accelerate breakthroughs in medicine, materials and energy.

We believe that with a modest increase in scale — to perhaps 20 or 30 ions — quantum simulations could tackle chemical systems too complex for any classical supercomputer. That would open the door to rapid advances in drug development, clean energy, and our fundamental understanding of chemical processes that drive life itself.

Ivan Kassal, Professor of Chemical Physics, University of Sydney and Tingrei Tan, Research Fellow, Quantum Control Laboratory, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More........→May 24, 2025