Research Donors

You may have heard the recent news about an exciting new therapy that could transform the treatment of blood cancers. CAR T-cell therapy, (https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/‚Ķ/t‚Ä ¶/adoptive-cell-transfer) developed through experimentation with human blood is thought to be particularly potent in the treatment of ALL ‚Äì a blood cancer that primarily affects children.
This treatment has been given the green light on the NHS for children who are not responding well to conventional tr...eatment. Healthy human blood has been a key component in the development CAR T therapy and without continued supply of blood for research, progress on creating these groundbreaking new treatments would stall.
Please keep donating with @researchdonors and contribute to progress in this important field of research. You can learn more about CAR-T therapy here: https://bloodwise.org.uk/community/what-i s-car-t-therapy
#BloodDonation #CancerResearch
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Blood Fact: Did you know that therapeutic phlebotomy can be used as a treatment for disease? For example, in haemochromatosis there is an iron overload in the body. To treat this overload, blood is taken from the patient meaning their iron stores are then utilised to make new blood which brings iron levels back into the normal range. Maybe the Victorians were onto something after all!

What do we do with your blood?
Blood is a versatile product and researchers can request it in a variety of different forms. In our laboratory, we can separate the blood down into three main constituent parts: plasma, red cells and white cells depending on what researchers ask for.
Plasma, which is mostly water, carries much of the nutrients present in blood and is used in Alzheimer’s research to understand if it could temper or even reverse the cognitive decline associated with the disease. Red cells are the most abundant cell in the blood and carry oxygen around the body, they are particularly useful for malaria research. White cells act as the body’s defence system against attack from invaders and are invaluable in better understanding the immune response.

Sometimes it’s difficult to understand the slow pace of medical research. But it’s vital to remember that there are tangible, life changing breakthroughs at the other end of the process. When you donate blood with Research Donors you can help contribute to that next step.
To understand how a donation might contribute to scientific progress we only need examine our improvement in understanding cancer. The BRCA genes discovered in 1994 and 1995, linked to breast and ovarian ca...ncer, are a good place to start. The discovery of these genes would not have been possible without 5000 blood donation volunteers that enabled researchers to identify commonalities in cancer affected families. The impact of this discovery has led to the development of drugs that specifically target BRCA linked cancer.
Examples of possible contributions are many, but here are a few: Your blood may be part of a larger data collection process used to highlight patterns that would offer insight into the origin of disease. Your blood could help ensure the safety of a new cancer treatment, or help test immune responses to new drugs.
Your donation counts.
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