When preforming surgeries, an obstacle that has to be dealt with is making sure that the patient;s blood doesn’t coagulate (or thicken) when it comes into contact with metal intruments. This is currently dealt with by a drug called heparin, which thins the blood so that it doesn’t have an adverse reaction to the touch of an instrument. Heparin is widely used and is successful…most of the time. It creates negative reactions in three to ten per cent of all patients in which the blood will coagulate and clot up all around an instrument as soon as direct contact is made. The image below shows that when Heparin fails, coagulation occurs and the device used in surgery is covered with blood clots:

At Brigham Young University, BYU, an alternative solution has been found. Dr. Kenneth Solen and Jared Parker, biomedical engineers who have dedicated much time to this problem, believe that a different type of precaution needs to be taken. They suggested that rather than adding something to the blood that may induce an immune reaction, they would like to remove something. There exist specific proteins in the blood that carry a strong electrical charge in order to cause coagulation. One could conclude that to remove these proteins, something with a negative charge must be utilized. Therefore, the research team used a negatively-charged gel to attract and remove these coagulation proteins, while leaving the rest of the neutral and negatively-charged proteins in the blood. In the lab, this was proven to be successful, however human testing has not been conducted yet. Dr. Solen continues to pursue the perfection of this innovation at W.L. Gore.

After Dr. Solen’s anticoagulation method, the device used in surgery remains clear of blood clotting:

I would like to thank Blake Ferguson for sharing this article with me.

-Amy

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.