Blood-Cleaning Machine Quickly Eliminates Carbon Monoxide in Rats

A device that illuminates and oxygenates blood outside of the body before pumping it back in removes the gas by freeing hemoglobin from CO.

Written byRuth Williams

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ABOVE: An extracorporeal CO remover with phototherapy (ECCOR-P) machine
COURTESY OF THE MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL

Hemoglobin in the body’s red blood cells binds carbon monoxide 200 times more tightly than it does oxygen, which explains why exposure to the gas can be so deadly. But this toxic bond can be broken by light. Despite the discovery of this vulnerability more than 100 years ago, researchers are only just beginning to investigate its clinical potential in cases of CO poisoning. A paper in Science Translational Medicine today (October 9) describes a novel device that, by illuminating blood with red light while simultaneously exchanging carbon monoxide for oxygen, can quickly eliminate the toxin from rats.

“This device . . . could shorten the time for carbon monoxide removal, an important step in any possible new treatment for carbon monoxide poisoning,” writes Mark Gladwin of the University of Pittsburgh in an email to The ...

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Meet the Author

Ruth Williams
Ruth is a freelance journalist. Before freelancing, Ruth was a news editor for the Journal of Cell Biology in New York and an assistant editor for Nature Reviews Neuroscience in London. Prior to that, she was a bona fide pipette-wielding, test tube–shaking, lab coat–shirking research scientist. She has a PhD in genetics from King’s College London, and was a postdoc in stem cell biology at Imperial College London. Today she lives and writes in Connecticut.
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