Better Than Blood? | Popular Science

Better Than Blood?
A man-made, pure-white compound called Oxycyte carries oxygen 50 timesas effectively as our own blood. Researchers are betting that it´s thebest way to treat America´s leading cause of accidental death:traumatic brain injury
By Nicole DavisPosted 11.01.2006 at 2:00 am0 Comments
by John B. Carnett: Photo by John B. Carnett
Grace LeClair had just finished eating dinnerwith friends when she got the phone call every parent dreads. Thechaplain at the Medical College of Virginia was on the other end.â€Your daughter has been in a serious accident. You should come toRichmond right away.†LeClair was in Virginia Beach at the time, atwo-hour drive from 20-year-old Bess-Lyn, who was now lying in a comain a Richmond hospital bed.
The friend who was with Bess-Lyn has since filled in the details ofthat day in March. The two women were bicycling down a steep hill,headed toward a busy intersection, when Bess-Lyn yelled that her brakesweren´t working and she couldn´t slow down. Her friend screamed for herto turn into an alley just before the intersection. But Bess-Lyn didn´tturn sharply enough and crashed, headfirst, into a concrete wall. Shewasn´t wearing a helmet. By the time the ambulance reached thehospital, Bess-Lyn was officially counted among the 1.5 millionAmericans who will suffer a traumatic brain injury (TBI) this year.
Bess-Lyn´s mom was halfway to Richmond when she received a secondcall, this time from a doctor. â€He was telling me that she had a veryserious injury, that she had to have surgery to save her life and thatif I would give permission, they would use this experimental,not-approved-by-the-FDA drug,†Grace LeClair recalls. â€He said thatit would increase the oxygen supply to her brain. To me that only madesense, so I said yes.â€
With her mother´s verbal consent, Bess-Lyn was treated with a typeof artificial blood called Oxycyte, the subject of a clinical trial ledby doctors at the teaching hospital of Virginia CommonwealthUniversity. In animal tests, the compound has been proven to cut theeffects of brain damage nearly in half, presumably because its tinyparticles can ferry oxygen through swollen, injured vessels our own redblood cells can´t squeeze through. (The suffocation of brain cells is amajor contributor to brain damage.) The doctors´ next step is to getthe same result in accident victims like Bess-Lyn, who
became thethird of eight patients to be enrolled in the hospital´s pilot Phase IIclinical trial, designed to test the drug´s safety and efficacy. IfOxycyte performs well in subsequent trials, it will become the firstdrug the FDA approves to treat traumatic brain injury in the U.S. andin hot spots like Iraq, where TBI has become horrifyingly common.
THE RED AND THE WHITE
Oxycyte is the newest product in a family of compounds known asartificial blood. The search for a synthetic substitute for human bloodbegan at least as early as the 19th century, when doctors actuallytried using milk to replenish blood loss. With the onset of the AIDScrisis in the early 1980s, pharmaceutical companies took on the causein force, competing to create an artificial substance that couldeliminate the problems-including tainted blood and supplyshortages-associated with donated blood. The idea was that thesesubstitutes could replace the use of donated blood in transfusions,during surgery, and in patients who had experienced major blood lossthrough injury.
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