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Title: Polyethylene Glycol Microspheres Conjugated with Hemoglobin as Artificial Red Blood Cells
As part of the PI's outreach, a course-based undergraduate research experience engaged undergraduate women in research from examining the literature to identify a gap, formulating a research hypothesis, designing experiments to test the hypothesis, analyzing the data, writing and submitting an abstract and presenting the research to the scientific community. This project was as follows: in the US, 5 million people require blood transfusions each year. Although generally safe, there are drawbacks to blood transfusions including fever, acute immune or delayed hemolytic reactions, anaphylactic reactions, transfusion related acute lung injury, and bloodborne infections. Despite screening for diseases such as HIV and hepatitis, the risk of contraction is nonzero, and there are continually emerging bloodborne diseases such as Zika that are not yet screened for. Additionally, there are often blood bank shortages. These complications have driven decades of research into artificial blood, yet to date there are no blood substitutes clinically available. While hemoglobin based oxygen carriers have shown promise, they also show oxidative damage to tissues, particularly in cardiac and renal tissues. Both high and low oxygen PEGylated hemoglobin (Hb) have shown such oxidative stress. We hypothesized that this oxidative stress was due to direct delivery of the PEGylated Hb and conjugated PEGylated Hb onto PEG hydrogel microspheres. In this study, we probed the ability of the Hb microspheres to deliver oxygen.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1752079
PAR ID:
10139165
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Biomedical Engineering Society
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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