Scientists from Emory University, Georgia Tech, and the Blood Center of Wisconsin have developed a platform for studying the bleeding and clotting of wounds that is able to reproduce natural processes like never before. The technology should help to better understand how various processes, such as clot formation and repair of broken vessels, work together to heal damaged tissues and potentially lead to new drugs and therapies to improve and speed up such processes.
The new wound-mimicking device replicates how a wound bleeds, how clots form to stop the bleedings, and the way that the lining of blood vessels is repaired naturally.
The researchers’ new device features a pneumatic valve covered by a layer of endothelial cells, the same type that line the walls of blood vessels. When the valve is opened, blood is allowed to flow through the newly created wound.
There’s more work that can still be done to improve the wound model, including introducing smooth muscle cells and larger vessels into the system.
The following movie demonstrates the wound simulator. In the video, the erythrocytes are round grey donuts and platelets are seen as smaller particles. The red-colored cells are, counter-intuitively, white blood cells. Fibrin, which helps create a clot, shows up in green.
Open access study in Nature Communications: A microengineered vascularized bleeding model that integrates the principal components of hemostasis…
Via: Emory University…
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