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Canberra Today 20°/24° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

‘Game-changing’ device helps prevent strokes

A “GAME-CHANGING” device could prevent millions of worldwide deaths from heart attacks and strokes every year.

The device, a bio-optics diagnostic device, which was invented and trialled by a team of engineers and biochemists at ANU, can reveal the formation of blood clots and help doctors to identify patients at imminent risk of having a stroke or heart attack.

“Using the new diagnostic device that our team has developed, we can create and quantify clot formation in 3D view from a blood sample without any form of labelling such as fluorescence or radiotracer – this had been impossible to achieve until now,” said ANU biomedical engineer Dr Steve Lee, who is the research team leader with associate Prof Elizabeth Gardiner, from the John Curtin School of Medical Research (JCSMR).

Predicting the formation of a blood clot is challenging because of the dynamic environment in which a clot forms. Blood platelets, which are a tenth of the size of a regular cell, are the major drivers of blood clot formation and they clump together within seconds when triggered.

Ms Gardiner said that doctors treated people at risk of heart attack or stroke with blood-thinning medication, but there was no way to know a patient’s susceptibility with precision – until now.

“We can apply this technology to blood from patients at risk of clotting or uncontrollable bleeding – this is a potential gamechanger,” she said.

Sherry He, a CSC-PhD scholar in Dr Lee’s group at the ANU Research School of Engineering said the device creates a digital hologram of a microscopic blood clot at a fraction of a second by measuring the delay time for light to travel through the clot.

The team tailored a microfabricated device that can mimic a damaged blood vessel and created blood clots from human samples to reveal these blood-clotting events in the laboratory.

Ms He said the device can be fitted onto a regular microscope, but was not yet suitable to be used at the bedside.

“We need to shrink our diagnostic device, which takes up a fair amount of space in a research lab at the moment, to something that can fit into a shoebox so that it can be used in a clinical setting,” she said.

Dr Samantha Montague, a postdoctoral fellow from the Gardiner group at JCSMR, who also supported the development of the new diagnostic device said the device would be further developed in tandem with existing clinical and platelet research practices.

“We have set up this new diagnostic device at JCSMR right alongside routine flow cytometry equipment that are the gold-standard for cell and blood platelet analysis,” she said.

The work is published in Advanced Biosystems.

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