When donated blood is in low supply, platelets are even scarcer. These cell fragments, which are essential for blood clotting, have a short shelf life. Whereas whole blood can be refrigerated for up to a month, platelets last for just a week at most.
“Even if you have a ton of donations, you can’t bank them for long,” says Ashley Brown, an associate professor in the joint biomedical engineering program at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
To address this problem, Brown and her team have created an artificial substitute that could be stored for long periods of time. In a recent paper in Science Translational Medicine, they describe using their synthetic platelets to stop bleeding and promote healing in rodents and pigs.
Natural platelets circulate in the blood and prevent or stop bleeding by forming clots. Sometimes, the body needs…
