Too thin for comfort: a red-blooded medical challenge: creating a safer treatment to counteract the effect of blood thinners.

• Author: Thaler, Sebastian
• Position: Medicine & Health

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THE WORST DAY of Dennis Quaid's life was Nov. 19, 2007. On that Monday morning, the actor and his wife Kimberly rushed to Los Angeles' Cedars-Sinai hospital, where their 12-day-old twins, Thomas Boone and Zoey Grace, had been admitted two days earlier for treatment of routine staph infections. As Quaid related in a profile in AARP: The Magazine, a pediatrician then informed the couple that their twins inadvertently been overdosed massively with the blood thinner heparin, putting them at risk of bleeding to death. To reverse the effects, doctors gave the newborns protamine sulfate. Late on the second day of the emergency, the infants' blood coagulation levels inched back into the normal range. The children miraculously suffered no lasting ill effects, and the experience inspired Quaid to take up a new cause: preventing negligence-caused medical mishaps.

However, this happy ending obscures a disturbing reality: Quaid's family was doubly lucky that day in 2007. The first bit of luck involved the fact that the children survived. The second was that the protamine they were given to stop their bleeding did not harm them. This is because the use of protamine--in spite of its ability to counteract the effects of the blood thinner heparin--harbors multiple risks of its own.

Every day in hospitals around the world, surgeons are faced with a daunting task: making sure that their patients do not experience blood clotting as they are undergoing an invasive procedure. There is a simple and important reason for this. Blood clots potentially are life-threatening, since the clot has a chance of lodging in the patient's brain (and causing a stroke) or heart (and triggering a heart attack).

As a matter of routine, heparin, which has anticoagulant properties, is used for this purpose in certain acute surgical situations, including coronary artery bypass and other cardiothoracic procedures, all in the hopes of preventing blood clots from forming while the patient is under the knife. Once the surgical procedure is complete, though, the action of the heparin must be reversed. This step is necessary in order to allow the patient's blood to clot, letting the individual heal normally and avoid the risk of uncontrolled bleeding.

Meanwhile, there exists a separate challenge that involves the need to minimize the potential for blood dotting in patients who require longer-term care outside the selling of a hospital. A class of substances known as low molecular weight heparins (LMWH)--which are different from the ordinary variety--usually are...