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Research work at Case Western Reserve University could save lives on battlefield
A Case Western Reserve University biomedical engineer and her former doctoral student have developed synthetic platelets that may help slow internal bleeding, saving lives after injury on the battlefield or other serious trauma.
Using a rat model, Erin Lavik, professor of biomedical engineering at CWRU, and James Bertram, who is now a fellow at the Food and Drug Administration, showed that the injected synthetic platelets stopped internal bleeding after an injury 23 percent faster than in untreated rats.
Rats injected with the platelets prior to injury stopped bleeding in half the time of the untreated animals.
"It's tremendously exciting," Lavik said. "It's early data and there are a lot of experiments that still need to be done, but the early work is promising and we're excited about it."
Their research was published online in the journal Science Translational Medicine in mid-December.
Lavik and Bertram spent six years developing the platelets, which are made of a biodegradable polymer. The synthetic platelets have three layers: a core made of material used in dissolvable stitches; a layer of water-soluble polymers that keeps the synthetic platelets from clumping together; and an outermost layer that has a molecule that helps the platelet bind to naturally occurring platelets, augmenting the body's own clotting process.
"We've tried to keep this very simple and build on technology that's well known in the hopes that if it does work that might make it more amenable to scaling it up and translating [to people]," said Lavik.
One of the current treatments for internal bleeding is recombinant factor VIIa, a naturally occurring protein that is important to blood clotting and is often used to treat hemophilia.
