Wallenberg Clinical Scholar Martin L Olsson and his colleagues are researching blood groups. One goal is to identify more blood groups than the ones we know today in order for the matching between blood donor and recipient to be perfect. Something they have already succeeded in doing. When they found the very rare blood group MAM, an opportunity opened up to, in the future, grow blood in the laboratory.
Martin and his colleagues have also discovered four blood group systems, all of which have specific properties. This can be important for the treatment of several diseases because it has been shown that that our blood groups can affect different things such as which infections we get and how easy it is to get a blood clot. They can even affect the risk of getting cancer.