Description du projet
Un substitut synthétique du sang pour la réanimation d’urgence
Il existe des directives spécifiques pour la transfusion sanguine standard qui tiennent compte de la compatibilité des groupes sanguins, de la santé générale du donneur et de l’absence d’infections nocives. Toutefois, celles-ci impliquent des tests chronophages qui causent des retards importants dans les situations d’urgence, comme les cas de traumatisme grave, où les patients ont perdu de grandes quantités de sang et ont besoin d’une transfusion immédiate. Le projet M-BLOOD, financé par l’UE, propose de développer un produit synthétique de transfusion qui recrée les propriétés biochimiques et biophysiques des globules rouges et peut transporter de l’oxygène et du dioxyde de carbone, réguler le taux d’oxyde nitrique, en plus de présenter une fonction antioxydante. L’idée est de pouvoir fournir un produit sanguin de réanimation pour les situations d’urgence.
Objectif
Each year, worldwide 5.6 million people die as a result of trauma. This fact makes uncontrolled bleeding the major cause of preventable death. Additionally, since almost 50% of the traumatic injures affect young people, uncontrolled bleeding has a tremendous social impact and results in an important financial burden to the healthcare system.
Donor red blood cells (RBCs) have the ability to restore O2 transport capacity and, as such, blood transfusions are a life-saving procedure for patients who have lost significant blood volume. However, time-consuming hurdles such as pathogen testing or donor-recipient cross-matching, need to be carried out prior to transfusion, causing fatal delays in emergency situations. Additionally, since donor RBCs can only be stored for a short period of time, stockpiles to be used in acute disasters do not exist.
Thus, blood substitutes prevail as highly sought after technologies to resolve the limitations associated with donor blood.
However, despite the intense efforts in the last decades, no product is currently approved for human use. This can be attributed to the rapid development of blood substitutes in the 1980s, due to fear of HIV contaminated blood, which resulted in a number of failures. Importantly, while research efforts have focused mostly on the development of simple O2-carriers, it is noted that, apart from O2-delivery, biological RBCs are also responsible for CO2 transport, nitric oxide regulation, and antioxidant functions; all of them crucial and life-saving tasks.
To this end, the ambitious goal of this proposal is to create a RBC MIMIC replicating the fundamental and potentially life-saving biochemical and biophysical aspects of RBCs.
Furthermore, to address patients co-morbidities resulting from acute blood loss, RBC MIMIC will be implemented with additional/extra tasks that are not present in biological RBCs.
I envision that RBC MIMIC will result on a superior blood surrogate for early stage resuscitation.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantInstitution d’accueil
2800 Kongens Lyngby
Danemark