Wood 1..8

make their red blood cells just go with the flow. the test could pinpoint those who may benefit from such therapies, putting more patients on treatment regimens that . can objectively identify patients who are not responding well to treatment or transfusion. Conversely, et al by Wood It may never be possible to predict the exact timing of vaso-occlusion, but the ex vivo biophysical test proposed patient's response to therapy, such as a blood transfusion or small-molecule drugs. reliable markers like white blood cell count and hemoglobin S fraction. Wood and colleagues could also predict a biophysical marker helped the authors to successfully identify benign versus severe samples, without using less deoxygenation would result in a drop in flow velocity, which could be measured as a change in conductance. This oxygen reservoir. As sickle cells become deoxygenated, they adopt their stiff, sickle shape. In their device, such which were ''benign.'' The blood was flowed through a microfluidic device consisting of a channel coupled to an . collected blood from 29 patients: 23 of which were classified as having ''severe'' disease, and 6 of et al Wood severity. a new type of marker that could stratify sickle cell patients on the basis of disease −− biophysical changes in blood . therefore devised a microfluidic device that can mimic this vaso-occlusive event, allowing them to detect et al Wood cell disease can be detected through genetic and molecular tests, there is no objective biomarker of clinical outcome. S, that changes cells into a rigid sickle, or crescent, shape and causes blood flow to slow markedly. Although sickle hemoglobin hemoglobin. For those with sickle cell disease, red blood cells carry a mutated form of hemoglobin, called In healthy people, blood flows freely throughout the body, delivering oxygen to tissues via the molecule or Not ... Going with the Flow