While blood at the macroscopic scale is frequently treated as a continuum by techniques such as computational fluid dynamics, its mesoscale behaviour is not so well investigated or understood. At this scale, the deformability of each cell within the plasma is important and cannot be ignored. However there is currently a lack of efficient computational techniques able to simulate a large number of deformable particles such as blood cells. This paper addresses this problem and demonstrates the applicability of the authors' recent multi-component lattice Boltzmann method for the simulation of a large number of mutually immiscible liquid species [Dupin MM, Halliday I, Care CM. Multi-component lattice boltzmann equation for mesoscale blood flow. J Phys A: Math Gen 2003;36:8517-34]. In here, biological cells are treated as immiscible, deformable, and relatively viscous drops (compared to the surrounding fluid). The validation of the model is based on the work of Goldsmith on the flow of solid particles, deformable particles and red blood cells [Goldsmith HL, Marlow JC. Flow behavior of erythrocytes. II. Particle motions in concentrated suspensions of ghost cells. J Colloid Interf Sci 1979;71:383-407]. We demonstrate, in particular, that the model recovers Goldsmith's observations on the flow properties of red blood cells and also the experimental observations of Frank on the flow of solid beads [Frank M, Anderson D, Weeks ER, Morris JF. Particle migration in pressure-driven flow of a brownian suspension. J Fluid Mech 2003;493:363-78]. The current article is the first validation of our new lattice Boltzmann model for a large number of deformable particles in this context and demonstrates that the method provides a new, and effective, approach for the modeling of mesoscale blood flow.