‘Blood Clot Probe’ Could Improve Care Of Stroke Patients

Peter Caravan and coauthors have reported a new technique that could find blood clots anywhere in the body with a single scan.

People who suffer strokes stemming from a blood clot often remain at risk because the initial clot can break apart and travel to other parts of the body, causing a second stroke if not quickly treated. Currently, doctors might run a number of scans after a stroke seeking further clots. Caravan, an Associate Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Caravan Lab in the MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, has developed with colleagues an imaging probe that could locate all of them at once with a whole-body positron emission tomography (PET) scan.

In a study reported on the Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology website in August, the probe successfully “lit up” clots throughout the body in a single scan in an animal model.

“We found that, with a single intravenous injection of our clot-finding probe 64Cu-FBP8, we were able to detect blood clots anywhere in the body using a positron emission tomography (PET) scan,” said Francesco Blasi, the first author of the study. Blasi was formerly a research fellow at the Martinos Center and is now at the University of Torino in Italy. “We also found that the probe may be able to distinguish recently formed clots from older ones—which can indicate the likelihood that a particular clot is the source the clot causing a stroke or pulmonary embolism—and reveal the composition of a clot, which can determine whether it will respond to clot-dissolving treatments.”

The researchers plan to begin experiments with human subjects early next year, with the goal of gaining deeper understandings of how the probe is distributed through the body and how long it stays there after injection. This will aid in designing subsequent studies exploring the diagnostic effectiveness of the probe.