Microspheres Could Save Patients Whose Lungs Have Stopped Working

[TECH NEWS]

As a first-year fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital a few years ago, John Kheir treated a nine-month-old girl whose lungs had been damaged by pneumonia and were filled with blood. In the 20 or so minutes it took for Kheir and his colleagues to put her on the heart-lung bypass machine, she suffered severe brain injury from low oxygen levels and died. “The only way to save someone like that would be to inject oxygen directly into the vein,” he says. Blood substitutes that carry oxygen are available for transfusion, but are known to cause dangerous side effects and furthermore typically rely on functioning lungs. Kheir’s oxygen-filled microspheres, reported June 27 in Science Translational Medicine, are around three micrometers in diameter and are diluted in a solution commonly used in transfusions so that the particles can flow through even small capillaries in the body. His group tested the microspheres in anesthetized rabbits with blocked windpipes. Although the rabbits were asphyxiated, their bodies were oxygenated and did not show signs of major injury to organs.

June 27, 2012, Susan Young, MIT Technology Review