New approach for identifying platelet dysfunction could help trauma patients

Dr. Nathan White, Dr. Alex St. John, and Dr. Xu Wang collaborated with colleagues in UW Department of Mechanical Engineering to develop a new microfluidic chip to measure the contractile forces of blood platelets. 

Platelets are critical to stopping bleeding after injury and often become dysfunctional after trauma. There are few options available to measure platelet dysfunction in real-time, so most treatments for traumatic bleeding are empiric. 

The results of this study published in Nature Communications demonstrate that directly measuring the force of a platelet’s contraction can help identify 

platelet dysfunction in Emergency Department trauma patients, and perhaps one day help to guide blood transfusions after trauma.