Every year, millions of people around the world suffer an ischemic stroke, the most common type of stroke.
It happens when a blood clot blocks an artery supplying blood to the brain. Because brain cells begin to die within minutes without oxygen, finding people at high risk before a stroke occurs is one of the biggest goals in modern medicine.
A major challenge is that stroke risk is different for every person. Two people may have similar narrowing in their neck arteries, yet one may develop a dangerous blood clot while the other never does. This makes it difficult for doctors to decide who needs more aggressive treatment.
A new study from researchers at the University of Sydney offers a possible solution. The team has developed an artery-on-a-chip that creates a ‘physical twin’ of a patient’s artery. Their research was published in the journal Cell Biomaterials.
The tiny laboratory device is designed to copy the exact shape of a patient’s carotid artery, one of the main blood vessels carrying blood from the heart to the brain. It also recreates how blood flows through that artery, allowing scientists to study clot formation under conditions that closely resemble what happens inside the body.
The researchers built these physical twins using information from six patients with different levels of carotid artery disease. They first created detailed computer models to calculate blood flow before reproducing those conditions on a small laboratory chip lined with living cells similar to those found inside human blood vessels.
The results showed that artery shape was just as important as the amount of narrowing. Even patients with similar blockage had very different blood flow patterns. Some arteries created swirling or disturbed blood flow, making clots more likely to form and break away.
To test this further, the scientists created tiny injuries inside each model artery, similar to damage that can happen naturally in diseased blood vessels. The clots that formed behaved differently in each patient’s physical twin. This suggests that every person’s artery has its own unique risk profile.
Lead researcher Professor Lining Arnold Ju said the project was inspired by the fact that some patients considered to be at low risk still experience severe or fatal strokes. The researchers wanted to move beyond simple measurements of artery narrowing and develop a tool that captures the full picture of each patient’s blood vessel.
The team believes this technology could eventually help doctors make more personalized treatment decisions. Instead of relying only on scans showing the size of a blockage, they may one day be able to test how a patient’s own artery behaves and estimate how likely a clot is to travel to the brain.
The researchers have already begun recruiting patients for a clinical trial to see how well the technology works in real medical practice. They also believe the same approach could improve research into deep-vein thrombosis, peripheral artery disease, aneurysms, and other conditions involving abnormal blood flow and clotting.
This study represents an exciting advance in personalized medicine because it combines engineering, biology, and patient-specific data in a single laboratory model.
Although more testing is needed before it becomes part of routine healthcare, the findings suggest that recreating a patient’s artery outside the body could greatly improve stroke prediction and guide safer, more targeted treatments. The study was published in Cell Biomaterials.
If you care about stroke, please read studies about how to eat to prevent stroke, and diets high in flavonoids could help reduce stroke risk.
For more health information, please see recent studies about how Mediterranean diet could protect your brain health, and wild blueberries can benefit your heart and brain.
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