New Way to Prolong Life of Platelets

A study has found that a new method for treating and chilling blood platelets may prolong their shelf-life by a week or more, which could help to ease chronic shortages of platelets for transfusions. The findings were reported in the September 12, 2003, issue of Science.

When platelets are chilled to around 4oC, the temperature required to preserve them beyond five days, it causes certain receptors on their surface to cluster. After transfusion, cellular vacuum cleaners called macrophages detect the clusters and ingest the platelets, destroying them. Researchers found that adding a single substance to a supply of platelets induced a reaction that stacked a different sort of sugar molecule, a compound called UDP galactose, on top of the platelet's tell-take sugar molecule. This treatment allowed transfused platelets to evade detection by the macrophages after up to 12 days of storage.

Twenty-four hours after being transfused into mice, the number of chilled, treated platelets remaining in the blood stream was about 30% higher than the number of room-temperature platelets that remained. In contrast, untreated chilled platelets diminished rapidly after transfusion, the researchers found. The treatment also prevented much of the destruction that the macrophages inflicted upon untreated platelets.

"As the population gets older, we need more and more donations. And the number of younger donors is shrinking,” said Karin Hoffmeister of Brigham and Women's Hospital (Boston, MA, USA) and one of the co-authors. "The blood-banking industry loses a significant amount of money by throwing these bags of platelets away.” Colleagues in Sweden and Denmark assisted in the research.




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