Charles Drew scaled up plasma processing from test tubes to mass production in wartime
In August 1940 New York hospitals began collecting blood so its plasma could be shipped to Britain. Charles Drew, the project's medical supervisor, turned laboratory test-tube methods into the first successful mass production techniques, and almost 15,000 people donated within five months.
Plasma is the light amber liquid left once the cells are removed from blood, about 55 percent of total blood volume. It is up to 95 percent water, carrying dissolved proteins, glucose, clotting factors, salts, hormones and carbon dioxide. Albumins, made in the liver, are the most common proteins and keep blood thick enough to hold fluid inside the vessels; globulins include the antibodies of the immune system; fibrinogen forms clots. Take away the clotting factors and what remains is serum.
Its usual yellow comes from bilirubin, carotenoids, haemoglobin and transferrin, but it can turn green, brown, or cloudy when fat levels run high. Posture matters too: standing still for a long stretch pushes about 12 percent of plasma volume out of the vessels, thickening the blood left behind.
William Harvey described plasma in 1628, and the discovery of fibrinogen around 1770 made it easier to study. Gordon R. Ward proposed transfusing plasma in the British Medical Journal in March 1918. For the armed forces, the US developed dried plasma packed in two tin cans, one holding a 400 cc bottle of powder and the other a bottle of distilled water; mixed, it was ready in about three minutes. Drew, later director of the Red Cross blood bank, opposed the military rule of separating blood by the donor's race, insisting there was no racial difference in human blood. By the war's end the American Red Cross had supplied enough for over six million plasma packages.
In 1940 José Antonio Grifols Lucas founded Laboratorios Grifols in Spain and pioneered plasmapheresis, returning a donor's red cells almost immediately after the plasma is separated; in 1945 he opened the world's first plasma donation centre. Fresh frozen plasma is now on the WHO list of essential medicines. Blood types also flip for plasma: O negative is the universal donor for red cells, but AB plasma lacks the antibodies that might react with a recipient's cells, so AB donors are the universal plasma donors.
Source: Blood plasma
