Navy's Operation RESUS - Great Intentions - Topic May Crawl with Ethics Concerns

On new year's day we summarized the status of a medical development of particular significance to submariners and astronauts (resuscitation of operational casualties with severe blood loss without availability of blood transfusions). Today's news updated the unfortunate status of Hemopure product (clinical holds) and final attempts to get the product approved:

At the end of 2008, Biopure received another body blow, this time from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which refused to allow the U.S. Naval Medical Research Center to conduct a clinical trial of Biopure’s Hemopure product. The U.S. Navy had filed for a clinical trial for the resuscitation of operational casualties with severe hemorrhagic shock without availability of blood transfusions.

Biopure develops pharmaceuticals, called oxygen therapeutics, that are intravenously administered to deliver oxygen to the body’s tissues. Hemopure is approved for sale in South Africa for the treatment of surgical patients who are acutely anemic.

Biopure’s veterinary product Oxyglobin is the only oxygen therapeutic approved for marketing by both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Commission for the treatment of anemia in dogs.

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Monday, 23 March 2009 - An Alternative ...

British scientists to create 'synthetic' blood

Human embryos will be used to make an unlimited supply for infection-free transfusions

In Britain, the project was held up because of the difficulty of finding funding for "translational" research that attempts to take scientific studies in the laboratory into the earliest stages of commercial development. This problem has now been overcome.

Submarines are always silent and strange.