Bio‐inspired nanomedicine strategies for artificial blood components

Blood is a fluid connective tissue where living cells are suspended in noncellular liquid matrix. The cellular components of blood render gas exchange (RBCs), immune surveillance (WBCs) and hemostatic responses (platelets), and the noncellular components (salts, proteins, etc.) provide nutrition to various tissues in the body. Dysfunction and deficiencies in these blood components can lead to significant tissue morbidity and mortality. Consequently, transfusion of whole blood or its components is a clinical mainstay in the management of trauma, surgery, myelosuppression, and congenital blood disorders. However, donor‐derived blood products suffer from issues of shortage in supply, need for type matching, high risks of pathogenic contamination, limited portability and shelf‐life, and a variety of side‐effects. While robust research is being directed to resolve these issues, a parallel clinical interest has developed toward bioengineering of synthetic blood substitutes that can provide blood's functions while circumventing the above problems. Nanotechnology has provided exciting approaches to achieve this, using materials engineering strategies to create synthetic and semi‐synthetic RBC substitutes for enabling oxygen transport, platelet substitutes for enabling hemostasis, and WBC substitutes for enabling cell‐specific immune response. Some of these approaches have further extended the application of blood cell‐inspired synthetic and semi‐synthetic constructs for targeted drug delivery and nanomedicine. The current study provides a comprehensive review of the various nanotechnology approaches to design synthetic blood cells, along with a critical discussion of successes and challenges of the current state‐of‐art in this field. WIREs Nanomed Nanobiotechnol 2017, 9:e1464. doi: 10.1002/wnan.1464 This article is categorized under: Nanotechnology Approaches to Biology > Nanoscale Systems in Biology