Out of Body-shape

Keeping a patient alive can require diverting their blood through a machine to extricate or detoxify it before pumping back in – known as extracorporeal support. In the tubes, as in blood vessels, risk of blockage is reduced with anticoagulant drugs but they must be used sparingly as back in the patient they bring risk of bleeds. Here, researchers investigated changing the shape of the blood's platelets, the cells responsible for initiating coagulation. By causing platelets to change from their lens shape to become rounder (spherification) using a drug called colchicine, coagulation risk was reduced in extracorporeal systems without increasing bleeding risk.

Read the published research article here

Written by Lindsey Goff

Lindsey Goff

Editor-in-Chief

Formerly immunologist for Cancer Research UK, Lindsey has since moved into the field of scientific publishing. She looks after all BPoD editorial matters.

• Video from work by Rui Ji and colleagues
• State Key Lab of Tribology, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), April 2026