Developing a new ‘virtual platelet’ to study blood clotting

The Virtual Platelet - a computational model for the complex regulation of platelet function

Professor Jonathan Gibbins and his colleagues at the University of Reading are using a virtual model of a platelet to study blood clotting and look for new anti-clotting medicines to prevent people from having a heart attack or stroke. Platelets are blood cells that trigger your blood to clot when you cut yourself, and they stick together to form the clot itself. But sometimes they also trigger clots to form inside blood vessels, which can block blood flow to tissues and cause heart attacks and strokes. Working out how platelets sense injury and respond to it is very complicated and we need better research methods to develop improved anti-clotting drugs. Professor Gibbins and his team have combined mathematics and biology to develop a computer model of how a platelet is controlled– called the Virtual Platelet. So far, the model has allowed them to determine the role and importance of specific molecules in controlling how platelets become active and cause blood to clot. In this project the researchers will learn more about which proteins can cause platelets to be more easily activated and figure out whether the different ways that people respond to anti-clotting drugs can be predicted by the Virtual Platelet. This research will reveal the molecules or processes within platelet cells that may be targeted using new medicines to prevent thrombosis. It may also enable us to develop simple tests to tell which patients will respond best to which treatments.