New improved blood

http://img.timeinc.net/popsci/images/2006/10/newblood_main_485.jpg

...snow-white, completely synthetic substance made from perfluorocarbons, or PFCs, a compound whose chemical makeup closely resembles the nonstick Teflon in your frying pan. PFCs have the highest gas-dissolving capacity of any liquid and, when used with supplemental oxygen, allow blood to carry many times more oxygen than it normally does (and to carry more oxygen faster and more easily than hemoglobin-based substitutes). […]

(Jason) Highsmith clicks to a picture of an injured human spinal cord, and it looks as if the once-thriving forest of veins has been clear-cut. He assumes that the rats that received PFCs in his study maintained a healthy grove of veins even after injury, since the oxygen levels in their spinal cords were six times as high as in the rodents that didn’t get Oxycyte. “It’s like a miracle drug,” he says. “Like pouring oxygen over the tissues.”

Traumatic brain injury is now found in 30 percent of the injured veterans sent home to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq and Afghanistan—twice the percentage as in Vietnam. Often caused by the concussive force from insurgents’ improvised explosive devices or from penetrating head wounds, TBI can wipe out a victim’s memory, leave him blind, trigger epilepsy, or kill him outright. Many are calling it this war’s signature wound. So it’s no coincidence that the Army and Navy have expressed interest in the use of Oxycyte to deliver oxygen to the brain. Getting the military on board, Spiess says, improves the chance of getting the drug on a “fast track,” the sped-up FDA approval course that could put Oxycyte in Iraq by late next year.