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It represents a huge achievement, and the culmination of a long team effort, to finally establish this new blood group system and be able to offer the best care to rare, but important, patients, hematologist Louise Tilley from the UK National Health Service said last year, after nearly 2 decades of personally researching this bloody quirk. Watch the video below for a summary of their research: While we're most familiar with the ABO blood group system and the Rh factor (the plus or minus), humans actually have many different blood group systems based on the wide variety of proteins and sugars that coat our blood cells. Because this antigen lives on a myelin and lymphocyte protein, the researchers named the newly described system the MAL blood group. "MAL is a very small protein with some interesting properties which made it difficult to identify and meant we needed to pursue multiple lines of investigation to accumulate the proof we needed to establish this blood group system," explained University of the West of England cell biologist Tim Satchwell."