From Medical XPress:
"Platelets only last about five days," said Ashley Brown, Ph.D., an associate professor in the joint biomedical engineering program at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "This makes them one of the weakest—yet most critical—links in the chain when you look at blood products we need to access quickly."
And that's just the beginning of the difficulties. Platelets are frequently in short supply as they're harvested from human donors, they're hard to transport, and they can carry contamination risks.
To overcome these obstacles, Brown and her team have come up with something novel that just might check all the boxes: synthetic platelets. The synthetic platelets they have designed have a long shelf life, can be stored under a variety of conditions, and don't carry contamination risks in the animal models they've so far been tested on.
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