Blood clots get analysed

Microvisk Technologies has recently secured £1.025m of funding to develop a new system to diagnose and monitor bleeding and blood clotting disorders.

A spin-out company of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), Microvisk's blood clotting measurement device is primarily aimed at patients who take anti-clotting drugs, such as Warfarin, also known as 'anti-coagulants'. For these patients, frequent blood testing is a necessity, which means that hundreds of thousands of tests are carried out every year in the UK alone.

Anti-coagulant drugs reduce the blood's ability to form clots. Although blood clotting is essential to prevent serious bleeding in the case of skin cuts, clots that occur inside blood vessels can block the flow of blood to major organs, causing heart attacks and strokes. However, because anti-coagulants reduce the blood’s ability to clot, they can increase the patient’s risk of severe external or internal bleeding or blood loss. It is therefore essential that the blood is accurately monitored so that the correct dosage of medication required can be calculated exactly.