Kevin Ward, MD, and Jianping Fu, PhD
Product Description: A small, inexpensive, easy-to-use and maintain, near point-of-care whole blood thromboelastography device (mHRM) that provides equivalent results to commercially available thromboelastography devices in less time.
Project Overview: Every year in the US, there are 14.6 million blood transfusions and 350,000 major cardiovascular surgeries that require the acute use of blood products (pro-coagulation) or anticoagulants to maintain hemostasis and prevent the development of coagulopathy in patients.
Blood coagulation is a critical hemostatic process that must be properly regulated to maintain the delicate balance between bleeding and clotting. The most widely used coagulation monitoring tests, prothrombin time (PT) and activated partial thromboplastin time (aPTT), only provide information on clotting time associated with the plasma protein compartment of the coagulation system and not on other critical measures including platelet function, clot strength, and fibrinolysis. Coagulation diagnostics using whole blood thromboelastography are rapidly gaining clinical acceptance and provide information on all critical measures. However, commercially available systems are significantly limited by their size, cost, inter-assay variability, and significant user intervention. This renders them suboptimal for point-of-care (POC) or near-POC applications.
Emergency Medicine Physician Kevin Ward, MD and Mechanical Engineer Jianping Fu, PhD, have developed a small, inexpensive, easy-to-use and maintain, near point-of-care whole blood thromboelastography device (mHRM) that provides equivalent results to commercially available thromboelastography devices in less time. With Coulter funding, the team will improve the mHRM manufacturing method, conduct clinical testing to verify mHRM reliability, and demonstrate equivalency of the mHRM to commercially available thromboelastography devices. The technology will allow wider scaling of important coagulation measures that may reduce blood product use and improve survival in patients requiring coagulation management.
Link to technology at UM Tech Transfer: http://inventions.umich.edu/technologies/6536_a-microscale-whole-blood-coagulation-assay-platform
Email Thomas Marten (tmarten@umich.edu) for more information.