Nanoparticles That Speed Up Blood Clotting Can Be Lifesaving Someday

Whether an injury takes place on a highway or a battlefield excessive bleeding can lead to death. A lot many lives could be saved if the doctors had some technique to slow down or stop bleeding due to sudden injuries. The medical world has so many techniques and methods in place that are used for stopping blood loss but most of those are for external bleeding, internal bleeding can only be stopped through surgery. But not anymore, a team of researchers recently developed nanoparticles that form a cluster at the point of injury and help in formation of blood clots. These particles have been declared valid for in vivo and test tube treatments.

Erin B.Lavik, one of the researchers explains, “When you have uncontrolled internal bleeding, that’s when these particles could really make a difference. Compared to injuries that aren’t treated with the nanoparticles, we can cut bleeding time in half and reduce total blood loss.” SO many years have passed, but still trauma remains one of the biggest killers of teenagers and kids. Doctors have very few options when it comes to such cases. Lavik’s team here has addressed a great issue, the nanoparticle they have developed behaves like a bridge that binds activated platelets and help them in coming together to form the clot. In order to perform this, the nanoparticles have been etched with a molecule that are capable of sticking with glycoprotien that are found only within activated platelets.

The initial studies revealed that these nanoparticles played a significant role in stopping bleeding in rodents who had spinal or brain injuries. But the question remains the same, if it can save rodents can it save humans as well?

To address this question, they tested these particles against pig’s blood during the next phase of this project. The particles triggered a complement in this experiment and it was completely successful. Lavik further adds, “We made a battery of particles with different charges and tested to see which ones didn’t have this immune-response effect. The best ones had a neutral charge.” The neutral kind of nanoparticles had some of their own issues. In absence of any repulsive charge-charge reactions, these particles have a tendency to aggregate right before these are injected in a body. In order to fix this problem, the researchers tweaked the solution in which nanoparticles were placed, they added a slippery polymer in order to keep each particle separate from each other.