St. Louis Public Radio (April 13) -- Allen Doctor, a professor of pediatrics at Washington University, and his colleague Dipanjan Pan, a professor of bioengineering at Illinois, are trying to create artificial blood. They eschewed former methods and decided to try a different route: encasing hemoglobin in a synthetic polymer shell. The artificial “cells,” called ErthryoMer, have the same flattened disc-like shape as a red blood cell, but they’re about one-fiftieth the size.