The researchers used materials already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to develop the coating. They applied the coating to tubing and catheters that were inserted in pigs’ large blood vessels.
The blood in the pigs’ blood vessels did not clot for at least eight hours after the tubing and catheters were inserted, demonstrating a potential alternative for heparin.
“Devising a way to prevent blood clotting without using anticoagulants is one of the holy grails in medicine,” said Donald Ingber, MD, PhD, a founding director of Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, in a Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences report.
The researchers call their repellent coating Tethered-Liquid Perfluorocarbon surface. TLP repelled blood from 20 “medically relevant” substrates, including plastic, glass and medal.
Additionally, TLP demonstrated significant resistance to Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria. The bacteria was grown in TLP-coated tubing for more than six weeks, and less than one in one billion bacteria were able to adhere to the coating, researchers found.
“We feel this is just the beginning of how we might test this for use in the clinic,” said Daniel Leslie, co-lead author and a Wyss Institute staff scientist.
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