'Gwada negative', new blood group identified in French woman

A French woman from the island of Guadeloupe has been identified as the only known carrier of a new blood group, called “Gwada negative”, an official from the French Blood Institute (EFS) said on Friday, confirming information from the broadcaster France Inter.

In 2011, a “very particular and unknown antibody” was detected in this patient, but the technical means at the time did not allow for further investigations, explained Thierry Peyrard, pharmacist and medical biologist, responsible for the quality and safety of blood products at the EFS.

Scientists were able to “solve the mystery” starting in 2019 thanks to “very high-speed DNA sequencing” which revealed a genetic mutation, he added.

The name “Gwada negative,” which references the patient’s Guadeloupean origins and “sounds good in all languages,” was very well received by specialists, according to Peyrard.

The discovery of this new group was made official at the beginning of June in Milan by the International Society of Blood Transfusion (ISBT), the EFS indicated on social media.

Now in her sixties, the patient was 54 years old and living in Paris when, during some routine tests prior to a surgical operation, the unknown antibody was detected, Peyrard reported.

“Today, only she is compatible with herself in the entire world,” while for other rare blood groups there are usually small groups of compatible people, like siblings.

This woman would be, according to the specialist, “the only known case in the world”.

The researcher and his team are currently developing a special protocol with the hope of finding other people with the same group, “especially in Guadeloupe, among blood donors.”

This blood group is inherited from both parents, each of whom was a carrier of the mutated gene. Like her parents, the patient's siblings were carriers of a single allele, so they did not have this blood group, which only manifests itself when two identical genes are inherited.

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