Preventing unwanted platelet activation

The physiological importance and integration of receptor-mediated inhibitory mechanisms in platelets in health and disease (renewal)

Professor Jonathan Gibbins and his team at the University of Reading will study what chemical signals keep platelets inactive when they are not needed for clotting. Platelets are blood cells that protect us from losing too much blood from a wound. They travel in the blood and when they encounter damage, like a cut in the blood vessel lining, they trigger the blood to clot and this eventually forms a scab. While this is vital for survival, platelets can cause blood clots inside arteries that can trigger heart attacks and strokes. Despite advances in treatments for heart and circulatory disease, heart attacks and strokes still claim hundreds of thousands of lives in the UK each year. We need to understand more about how platelets are controlled to develop more effective anti-clotting drugs. In this study the Reading team will try to work out how platelets react to the combination of chemical signals they constantly receive in the body that control how they work. They aim to find out how the signals are affected in people who have insulin resistance, which can lead to diabetes, or circulatory diseases. They also intend to find out which signals determine how likely someone’s blood is to clot, and which processes could possibly be targeted and controlled by future medicines. This research will improve our understanding of platelets and may reveal new ways to prevent unwanted clotting.