Abstract
Measurements of parameters of hemostasis like thromboplastine time (PT) have primary significance in many clinical settings including extensive surgery, dialysis or innate disorders of hemostasis. Recently, several reports have documented the principle suitability of Quartz Crystal Microbalances (QCM) for measuring parameters of hemostasis like PT or platelet aggregation. But for the establishment of an exact QCM based method as alternative to standard coagulometer measuring QCM coatings with significantly enhanced robustness and reusability have to be worked out. For this purpose we utilized a new semi-automated equipment qCell T for measuring and compared different coatings consisting of polymer films and absorbed nanoparticles (NPs). We demonstrated that affinity based poly ethylene NPs absorbed to polymer films on the QCM constitute a powerful tool with no need for pretreatment for measuring PT in whole blood samples in real time, while these coatings are reusable up to 10 times. PT measurements in excellent agreement with coagulometer tests pave the way for possible future application of QCM in clinical routine.
Highlights
The use of NPs in medicine spreads rapidly
Since NPs interact with blood coagulation [2] and NPs can be imprinted with specific domains [3,4], the NPs bear in principle large potential as basic quartz coating
We employed Quartz Crystal Microbalances (QCM) as transducer consisting of a piezoelectric AT-cut-QCM coated with two differently sized gold electrodes (8 mm diameter and 5 mm diameter respectively), one on each side
Summary
The use of NPs in medicine spreads rapidly. NPs play more and more an important role for drug delivery, therapy and diagnostic. Hemostasis monitoring during surgical operations has fundamental significance especially in cardiac surgery involving extracorporal circulation devices In such procedures blood parameters can drastically change within the lapse of a few seconds to minutes due to exposure of patients’ haemostatic system to large disturbances such as haemo-dilution or anticoagulation. Some unwanted interactions of the blood with artificial surfaces may cause coagulation activation, blood platelet aggregation [5] or proinflammatory effects [6,7] In such conditions frequent monitoring of the patients’ haemostasis status is often crucial for suitable therapeutic directions and decisions [8,9]. Regarding this purpose a large number of instruments with “point of care” capability have emerged. Following up on this work we here report use of affinity based-NPs adsorbed to polymer thin films for PT measured by the QCM method
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