When a patient's blood flows through catheters, stents or other medical devices, there's always a risk that harmful clots may form. An experimental new bio-inspired coating could keep that from happening, without the use of blood-thinning drugs. Any time that blood comes into contact with a non-bodily material, protective proteins in the plasma are triggered to isolate that material by forming a clot around it.
If that clot should form in something like a dialysis machine, it could hamper the treatment or even come loose and cause a stroke in the patient. In order to keep this from happening, doctors often administer blood-thinning drugs that stop the blood from coagulating. Such medications have negative side effects, however, including the risk of uncontrollable bleeding.
As a result, some scientists have developed anti-fouling coatings that repel the plasma proteins, keeping them from coming into contact with underlying synthetic surfaces. That said, according to from Canada's University of British Columbia, such coatings may still allow clots to form in some circumstances. With this problem in mind, Kizhakkedathu and colleagues created a "selective protein interacting" (SPI) coating, which works like the natural inner lining of blood vessels.
The polymer-based material contains "surface-conjugated sheltered positively charged macromolecules" (SPCMs), which actually with a plasma protein known as factor XII. In a nutshell, although the molecules do engage the protein, they.
