Squeezing blood from rice? It may sound impossible but an international team developed a method of making albumin, a protein important in human blood, from ordinary rice.

Albumin is the protein that helps transport fats and certain hormones in the bloodstream. Albumin is also often used for treating liver disease, traumatic shock and burns.

The discovery could impact hospital treatments because of human serum albumin supply shortages. Human serum albumin is often harvested from human plasma but demand for albumin tops 500 tons per year worldwide.. In China the demand for the protein was so high; hospitals resorted to synthetic albumin. With the current discovery, the protein could be harvested another way.

The rice method was developed by researchers in the Wuhan University in China and international colleagues from the National Research Council of Canada and the Centre for Functional Genomics at the University at Albany in New York.

The researchers first genetically engineered rice seeds to produce the protein. Scientists extracted 2.75 grams of HSA from every kilogram of brown rice, the equivalent of

When the researchers tested the rice-made albumin in rats with liver cirrhosis, a disease of the liver that can be treated with albumin, the rice-derived protein helped the animals eliminate excess abdominal fluid.

"Our results suggest that a rice seed bioreactor produces cost-effective recombinant (human serum albumin) that is safe and can help to satisfy an increasing worldwide demand for human serum albumin," the study researchers concluded.