Yongsheng Gao
University of Texas at Dallas, TX·Biomedical Engineering
Platelets are small blood cell fragments known for sealing wounds, but they also travel to injured or diseased tissue and signal to other cells. Uncontrolled bleeding after injury causes roughly 2 million deaths a year worldwide, and platelets also take part in cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis and infection.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Materials Science
Chemistry
- Topics
platelets
hemostasis
traumatic bleeding
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through May 2030
What they work on
- Fabricate sliding-hydrogel microparticles whose sliding ring crosslinks carry multiple bleeding-site-binding peptides, giving the particles both injury targeting and the ability to change shape like activated platelets.
- Test whether intravenously injected sliding microgels accumulate at vascular injury sites and promote clot formation and stabilization, assessing their hemostatic efficacy in laboratory assays and in animal models of traumatic bleeding.
- Determine how polymers of different architectures enter platelets and deliver genes into these nucleus-free cells, identifying the most efficient uptake pathways for genetic modification with polymeric carriers.
- Investigate whether the dynamic topology of polyrotaxanes, ring-on-chain polymers with self-adjusting ligand spacing, enables efficient, stress-free binding of agents to the surface of resting platelets.
More about the research
Both of the lab's projects use designed polymers: one builds artificial particles that imitate platelets to stop bleeding, the other develops materials that let researchers modify real platelets so they can carry treatments.
Why it matters
Trauma patients with massive bleeding often die before reaching a hospital. An injectable, platelet-mimicking particle that homes to bleeding sites could give first responders a new way to control hemorrhage in the field. Separately, safe methods for loading genes into platelets or decorating their surfaces could extend platelets beyond their current clinical use in bleeding, potentially toward new cell-based treatments.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Tara Deans
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Biomedical Engineering
Engineer synthetic gene networks that reprogram pluripotent stem cells to produce platelets with designed therapeutic functions.
Jonathan Pokorski
University of California-San Diego, CA·Chemistry
Develop ways to grow polymer chains of norbornene and oxanorbornene directly from cell surfaces using ring-opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP), a catalyst-driven reaction that links ring-shaped building blocks into chains.
Morgan Stefik
University of South Carolina-Columbia, SC·Materials Science
Determine how the chemical reactivity of polymers and nanoparticles controls lasting polymer-nanoparticle binding, so that designed polymer structure-directing agents keep particles in the order they were added.
The school
University of Texas at Dallas: 16 labs on PI Pages, $182M a year on research, 239 research doctorates a year.
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