RBC Research

This past week in ISM has been quite a productive one. Following up with last week’s blog post, I was actually able to accomplish both of my goals of learning more about oncology and hematology and finding more topics that I wanted to learn about. I found it really interesting that hematology and oncology are so closely connected. I did not know that there were such closely related topics, so learning about the overlapping of both subjects was pretty cool. In the article that I picked for my research assessment, there was information about blood tests and the use of stem cells to produce RBCs, or red blood cells. There are so many people in need of blood transfusions and some problems that come up with getting people blood transfusions are: getting people more blood in areas where it is scarce, finding a safe way to minimize the amount of complications that may occur during a blood transfusion, and finding people the right type of blood based on their blood type, since there is a shortage in rarer blood types. One idea that came up was: what if there was a way to get people the blood they needed at a lower cost but also be able to supply blood to those with rare blood types? It is no new information that blood transfusions are expensive. Some kind of alternative solution in which people can have access to the blood they need at a cost they can afford would be very useful. Aside from the research assessment in ISM last week, I began connecting with some professionals in the medical field through LinkedIn. It is so exciting to be able to connect with these real-world professionals and in the future, hopefully learn from some of them as well.