Blood substitute could help rural accident victims

A new blood substitute could increase the survival rate for rural accident victims, who often bleed to death before they reach a hospital.

The product under study, PolyHeme, plays the same role as blood, carrying oxygen to the brain, said Dr. Ernest E. "Gene" Moor, head of the Denver portion of experiments testing the worth of the substitute.

PolyHeme is manufactured by Northfield Laboratories, based in Evanston, Ill. The company is seeking federal approval to sell the product.

Moore headed the Denver portion of experiments using PolyHeme on accident victims. The product was tested at 32 trauma centers in 19 states, but the largest number of tests occurred in Denver.

The tests showed little difference in survival rates for accident victims who received PolyHeme compared with those given the standard treatment -- stabilization with a salt solution until they reach a hospital.

But those results occurred in urban areas, where victims were a few minutes from care, Moore said.

In rural settings and other non-urban areas, patients who receive PolyHeme would have a great advantage, he said.

"The obvious area would be in rural Colorado, where you're an hour or an hour and a half away from a trauma center and you've got a ruptured spleen and you've now bled to a level of dying from that," Moore said.

Results of the PolyHeme experiments have been submitted to the Journal of the American Medical Association but have not been accepted for publication, Moore said.

The manufacturer financed the study, but the results were independently analyzed, Moore said.

Denver Health has no financial stake in the product, he said.

Human blood used for transfusions has a shelf life of only 42 days. But PolyHeme makes use of blood beyond that time. It is manufactured by recovering hemoglobin -- the protein that carries oxygen -- from the expired blood. PolyHeme can be stored for a year, Moore said.

PolyHeme can be used on all patients, regardless of blood type, Moore said.

That cuts the time-consuming step of determining the blood type before starting a transfusion.

So far, doctors have found no limit to how long patients can be on PolyHeme before they must receive natural blood.

A woman with religious objections to transfusions received PolyHeme for 10 days after surgery, Moore said.

Another company, Biopure Corp., of Cambridge, Mass., is seeking FDA approval to market a similar product made from cow's blood, Moore said.

Biopure sells its product, Hemo pure, in several countries, including South Africa, according to the firm's Web site.

A veterinary version of the product has been approved in the United States.

Berny Morson is a reporter for the Denver-Rocky Mountain News.