Blood Bank Automation: From Fantus to ABB Lab Robots

Blood bank automation covers what happens to a donation after the needle comes out: spinning whole blood into red cells, plasma and platelets, then sealing, labelling, testing and storing each part. Much of that work is still done by hand. Technicians fold bags and load centrifuges, sometimes hundreds of times a day. This post starts with the first blood banks and the plastic bag, then turns to this autumn's news from blood centres in the US and England and to where ABB robots could fit. The needle end of the job has its own post on robotic blood draws.

An Army Reserve medical laboratory specialist clears the tube line of a blood collection bag before processing at a blood drive at Fort Knox, Kentucky, in July 2025. Photo: Sgt. Jerry Zuetrong / U.S. Army Reserve via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

From wartime blood banks to the plastic bag

Storing blood for later use is barely a century old. In 1917 Oswald Hope Robertson, a US Army officer attached to Britain's Royal Army Medical Corps, helped set up the first blood banks ahead of the Third Battle of Ypres, with soldiers as donors and the blood kept in bottles with sodium citrate. In 1930 Sergei Yudin organized a blood bank at the Sklifosovsky Institute in the Soviet Union, and in 1936 Frederic Durán-Jordà set one up in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. A year later Bernard Fantus opened a hospital blood bank at Cook County Hospital in Chicago and gave the idea its name.

Staff at work in the hospital blood bank at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in December 1944. Photo: Ed Westcott / U.S. Department of Energy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Anticoagulant and refrigeration let donated blood keep for some days. The Blood for Britain project began in August 1940, collecting blood in New York City hospitals and shipping the plasma to Britain, and its medical supervisor, Charles R. Drew, turned test tube methods into the first successful mass production technique. In 1950 Carl Walter and W.P. Murphy Jr. introduced the plastic blood bag. It replaced breakable glass bottles and made it practical to prepare several components from one unit of whole blood, which is now usually split by centrifuge. Red cells keep for up to 42 days in the fridge and plasma for a year in the freezer, while platelets last only five to seven days at room temperature.

Bottles of dried plasma are unloaded from vacuum drying chambers at a Cambridge University laboratory in 1943. Photo: Bryson Jack, Ministry of Information / Imperial War Museums via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Separating those parts is still largely manual work, and Terumo Blood and Cell Technologies counts 26 manual steps in the traditional process. Researchers at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia described the job in 2022. Each pack has to be folded in a particular way before it spins at high speed in a centrifuge rotor. A damaged or torn pack means a lost donation and exposes staff to biological material, and the repetitive motions, sometimes hundreds a day, strain workers. Platelets can also be collected directly by apheresis, where a machine keeps the platelets and returns the rest of the blood to the donor, but that donation can take 90 minutes or longer.

Technicians at work in the central laboratory of the Netherlands Red Cross blood transfusion service in Amsterdam, January 1952. Photo: Ben van Meerendonk / AHF, IISG via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

One-step processing and busier donor centres

Automation has now reached the centrifuge. Terumo's Reveos system, cleared by the FDA in 2023, separates whole blood into red cells, plasma and platelets in one automated centrifugation cycle. It handles balancing, centrifugation, expression, sealing and data capture, which Terumo says removes more than half of those 26 manual steps. On 19 October Versiti, a non-profit in Milwaukee that supplies hospitals in five states, became the tenth US blood centre to adopt it, adding platelet recovery from whole blood to its apheresis collections. Hoxworth Blood Center in Cincinnati, the third US centre to use Reveos, says four to six whole blood donations make one platelet product.

A US Navy laboratory officer uses a centrifuge in the blood bank aboard the hospital ship USNS Comfort in New York, April 2020. Photo: Navy Medicine / U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Demand is the other pressure. On 8 September the American Red Cross warned that the US blood supply remains vulnerable after recovering from critically low levels during a summer shortage, and it estimates that nearly half of donated platelets go to patients receiving cancer treatment. In England, NHS Blood and Transplant opened its largest donor centre in Reading on 20 October. It is the first where people can give blood, plasma and platelets under one roof, with platelet collections due to start before the end of the year. NHSBT says England needs more than 5,000 blood donations every day, and each one turns into bags and tubes that someone has to process.

A US Army lab technician prepares a soldier to give platelets by apheresis at Craig Joint Theater Hospital, Bagram Air Field, Afghanistan, in December 2015. Photo: Tech. Sgt. Robert Cloys / U.S. Air Force via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

We found no ABB robot in a blood bank. The closest ABB work is in hospital labs. At a general hospital in Halle, Germany, MVZ Medizinische Labore Dessau Kassel, part of the Limbach Group, runs Lab Table II, where two cleanroom versions of the ABB IRB 1300 handle blood samples next to technicians around the clock. One robot puts tubes into centrifuge cups and the second adds compensation tubes to balance the load, then feeds instrument racks and archives the samples, up to 160 an hour. At UTMB, two cells with ABB IRB 1200 robots took neutralizing antibody testing from about 15 tests a day by hand to 400 to 500. Our post on hospital lab automation has more examples.

Lab Table II at MVZ's hospital laboratory in Halle, Germany, where two ABB IRB 1300 cleanroom robots handle blood samples. Photo: ABB

Where blood bank robots could go next

Inside processing centres, the next job for robots is the handling around the machines. Swinburne's proof of concept used collaborative robots and four cameras. It moved blood packs by suction, folded them, checked labels and bag alignment and loaded the centrifuge, and it alerted an operator when something went wrong. In 2022 it was still slower than a person, and the team's industry partner was planning the next stage of commercialisation. A cleanroom arm like the IRB 1300 at MVZ could in principle do this kind of loading, and ABB's SafeMove software slows those robots to a safe speed when someone walks into the work area. Nobody has shown that in a blood centre yet, so it remains a possibility.

An ABB robot gripper lowers a labelled blood tube into a station on MVZ's Lab Table II. Photo: ABB

Testing and storage could follow. MVZ's labs carry out about 8.5 million tests a year, and its robot table shows that two arms can take tubes from reception through centrifugation to the archive. Platelets are the hardest product to manage, because they last five to seven days and must be kept at the right temperature and in constant motion until they are transfused. Storage is changing as well. The FDA already allows refrigerated platelets for some actively bleeding patients, and an August 2026 trial in JAMA found that platelets kept cold for up to three weeks met its standard for comparable bleeding control in heart surgery, although repeat operations were more frequent in that group.

A US Navy hospital corpsman tests blood samples to find a donor match for patients aboard USNS Comfort, April 2020. Photo: Navy Medicine / U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Regulation sets the pace. Reveos needed FDA clearance before US centres could use it, and a robot cell that touches blood bags would have to fit into the same regulated process. Traceability helps: the MVZ table reads each tube's cap colour and ID number with a camera and moves any sample with a discrepancy to an error rack. Cost matters for non-profit blood centres such as Versiti, and staff need new skills to run and maintain robot cells. Cells like these are usually designed and tested in simulation first, the way ABB and UTMB used RobotStudio to test different combinations of lab equipment and robot positions.

A technician loads a sample rack into the drawer of an ABB robot cell built for antibody testing at UTMB. Photo: ABB

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com