Collagen surfaces to measure thrombus formation under flow: possibilities for standardization.

摘要

Arterial thrombus formation is initiated by flow-dependent interactions of blood platelets and plasma components with the damaged vessel wall. In the last three decades, flow chamber-based methods have become increasingly popular for studying the process of thrombus formation in isolated whole blood, flowing at a predefined shear rate. Such devices containing immobilized collagens or other thrombogenic substances have yielded invaluable information on the mechanisms that regulate platelet adhesion and activation under flow, as well as on the role of the coagulation system in this setting. New developments are the use of small parallel-plate flow chambers, miniaturized variants of flow devices and small glass micro-capillaries for measuring thrombus buildup in small volumes of blood within short intervals of time (< 10 min). The research is now at a stage that flow chamber assays can be developed for (pre)clinical screening of blood samples from patients. However, a still problematic factor is the precise control of the properties of the surface that mediates the formation of platelet thrombi.