A patient who is losing large amounts of blood presents a medical emergency, requiring proper blood-typing and immediate access to multiple units of compatible blood. Health workers must hope that transfusing large amounts of blood doesn’t add to the emergency and that the patient has no objection to receiving blood products. Then there are the cost and logistics of maintaining large stocks of blood at the ready.The solution to these problems may lie in an inorganic compound with the cumbersome name dodecaflouropentane emulsion, or DDFPe, a fluorocarbon-based compound used originally as a contrast medium for taking ultrasound images that University at Buffalo researchers are developing as a blood substitute.Claes Lundgren, M.D., Ph.D., professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics in the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, is principal researcher on a new $1.5 million, four-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to fund work to define further the compound’s use for this purpose.
