In a new study, researchers develop synthetic blood-thinner that doesn’t cause bleeding side-effects.
The research was conducted by a team at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne and elsewhere.
Patients who suffer from thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, or stroke are usually administered drugs that help their blood flow more smoothly.
Anticoagulants, or “blood thinners” as they are popularly known, can keep blood clots from forming or getting bigger, and can, therefore, help with recovery from heart defects or prevent further complications.
But there is a catch: Blood thinners work by blocking enzymes that help to stop bleeding after an injury.
Because of this, virtually every blood thinner available today can lead to serious, and even life-threatening bleeding following an injury.
Recently, researchers studied mice genetically modified to be deficient in an enzyme that normally helps blood clot.
The enzyme is called coagulation factor XII (FXII), and the mice without the enzyme had a highly reduced risk of thrombosis without bleeding side-effects.
The discovery triggered a race for FXII inhibitors.
In the study, the team developed the first synthetic inhibitor of FXII. The inhibitor has high potency, high selectivity, and is highly stable, with a plasma half-life of over 120 hours.
They showed that the drug efficiently blocks coagulation in a thrombosis model without increasing the bleeding risk.
The finding showed it is possible to achieve bleeding-free anti-coagulation with a synthetic inhibitor.
The team then tested the effectiveness of the FXII inhibitor in artificial lungs and found that it efficiently reduced blood clotting, all without any bleeding side-effects.
The only problem is that the inhibitor has a relatively short retention time in the body: it’s too small and the kidneys would filter it out.
In the context of artificial lungs, this would mean constant infusion, since suppressing blood clotting for several days, weeks or months requires a long circulation time.
The researchers are currently engineering variants of the FXII inhibitor with longer retention time.
One author of the study is Professor Christian Heinis. The study is published in Nature Communications.
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