Nat commun: scientists create vascular repair models and observe the repair of blood vessels in real time!

February 10, 2018 / BIOON / - biomedical engineers have developed a small self-healing model system to study bleeding and wound caking The researchers believe the device could be used as a platform for drug discovery and as a potential diagnostic tool Relevant research results are published in nature communications Source: Dr Wilbur Lam, lead author of nature communications, said blood clotting involves vascular damage, platelets, clotting proteins that form networks, and the flow of blood itself "Now the way to study blood clotting needs to separate each component, which makes it impossible to understand the whole picture of blood clotting." Lam said he is an associate professor of pediatrics at Emory University School of medicine and biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech and University of Emory Wallace h Kurt The model was developed by the lam team in collaboration with Dr Shawn Jobe of the Wisconsin blood center The co first authors are Yumiko Sakurai, researcher, elaissa Hardy, lecturer, and byungwook Ahn, senior engineer This system is the first device to reproduce the process of vascular damage in microvessels: blood is lost due to trauma, white blood cells form clots and repair the vascular wall In the past, the model can only simulate the formation of plaque However, this model does not include smooth muscle, nor can it simulate the situation of large blood vessels The system consists of a layer of endothelial cells that surround the walls of human blood vessels The cells are cultured on the top of the pneumatic valve The researchers open a "skylight" by activating the pneumatic valve to create a wound Blood donated by volunteers flowed through the wound, about 130 microns in diameter In this case, it takes 8 minutes for blood to stop flowing, but when there is no endothelial cell, the blood will not stop flowing The system can respond to drugs or other processes that produce clotting disorders For example, the blood from hemophilia A patients will form abnormal clots, and the clotting time will be prolonged In this study, the authors also described at the 3D level how the drug etibatide affects the interaction between platelets and other cells Reference: Wilbur A Lam A Microengineering miscellaneous blending model that integrates the principal components of importance Nature communicationsvolume 9, article number: 509 (2018) doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-02990-x