Platelets may stop the immune system from attacking medical equipment, such as stents, as foreign objects
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskThis sort of activity at wound sites might normally draw the attention of the immune system, but that does not happen because platelets carry special proteins in their membranes which render them invisible to immune surveillance. Now, Wang Yunbing at Sichuan University in China writes inthat he has developed a way to apply these membranes to medical equipment of the sort destined for installation inside the human body.
For such small objects, this is reasonably simple. But not for large ones. Manipulating charge uniformly across a wide area is tricky, and no one has yet done it well enough to achieve successful fusion. Dr Wang therefore wondered if it might be possible to entice membranes to fuse to a large surface by manipulating that surface in other ways. Besides being attracted to negative charges, platelet membranes also spread easily and defect-free over “superhydrophilic” surfaces.
The team coated their experimental stents by dipping them in a solution of dopamine and a substance called sodium periodate. They then charged the coated stent to an appropriate negative voltage and dropped a suspension of “platelet-derived extracellular vesicles” onto it, before incubating it at 37°C for a couple of hours.This done, examination with a microscope indicated that the stent was indeed covered in platelet membrane.
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