I assumed the reason to use their own blood was to avoid detection. Presumably synthetic blood is weird enough that it becomes trivial to detect its presence that would make it a no-go for cheating.
Yes. Some of the proteins in the cells would be different to the host cells, due to the exogenous stem cell source. This might be detectable with mass spectrometry (protein sequencing is otherwise difficult and laborious). There might also be different post translational modifications on the lab cells.