Clean Injectables Depend On The Blue Blood Of Horseshoe Crabs

It’s one of the stranger, lesser-known aspects of US health care — the striking, milky-blue blood of horseshoe crabs is a critical component of tests to ensure injectable medications such as coronavirus vaccines aren’t contaminated, Meg Kinnard reported for the Associated Press.

Photo Insert: The horseshoe crab, an unsung hero of health care.

To obtain it, harvesters bring many thousands of the creatures to laboratories to be bled each year and then return them to the sea — a practice that has drawn criticism from conservationists because some don’t survive the process.

The blood, which is blue due to its copper content, is coveted for proteins used to create the LAL test, a process used to screen medical products for bacteria. Synthetic alternatives aren’t widely accepted by the health care industry and haven’t been approved federally, leaving the crabs as the only domestic source of this key ingredient.

Many of these crabs are harvested along the coast of South Carolina, where Gov. Henry McMaster promoted the niche industry as key to the development of a domestic medical supply chain, while also noting that environmental concerns should be explored.

“We don’t want to have to depend on foreign countries for a lot of reasons, including national security, so it’s good to see this company thriving in the United States,” McMaster told AP.

Horseshoe crabs — aquatic arthropods shaped like helmets with long tails — are more akin to scorpions than crabs, and older than dinosaurs. They’ve been scurrying along with the brackish floors of coastal waters for hundreds of millions of years.

Their value to avoiding infection emerged after scientists researching their immune response injected bacteria into horseshoe crabs in the 1950s.

They ultimately developed the LAL test, and the technique has been used since the 1970s to keep medical materials and supplies free of bacteria.

Their biomedical use has been on the rise, with 464,482 crabs brought to biomedical facilities in 2018, according to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

In South Carolina, that’s done only by Charles River, a Massachusetts-based company that tests 55% of the world’s injectables and medical devices — like IV bags, dialysis solutions, and even surgical cleaning wipes, according to company officials.

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