NCInnovation Moving Synthetic Platelet Research Closer to Clinical Trials
By Michelle Fiscus, Senior VP & Chief Communications Officer
On a rural North Carolina highway, a car accident happens miles from the nearest trauma center. The injuries are survivable—until they’re not. In those first minutes, before an ambulance can reach a hospital, before blood can be transfused, one factor determines the outcome: whether the bleeding can be stopped in time.
For Dr. Ashley Brown, Lampe Distinguished Professor in the Lampe Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at NC State University and UNC-Chapel Hill, that window—the space between injury and care—is the problem she has built her career around.
“The ability to rapidly establish hemostasis and successful cessation of bleeding is critical,” she says.
In trauma, especially outside of hospital settings, that ability often doesn’t exist. Blood transfusions remain the standard treatment for severe hemorrhage, but they come with limits—strict storage requirements, short shelf life, and dependence on donors. In rural areas or military settings, those constraints aren’t just inconvenient—they’re decisive.
Brown’s solution is deceptively simple to describe and extraordinarily complex to build: synthetic platelets.
“Platelets are the main cell in your body that stops bleeding,” she explains. “Synthetic platelets are a material that copy the function of natural platelets…to form a clot.”
Her team’s lead product, SymClot, is built for the moment when nothing else is available. It can be stored for long periods, transported without the constraints of blood products, and administered quickly—giving first responders a way to act immediately instead of waiting.
This matters in a state like North Carolina, where many communities sit more than an hour from a Level 1 trauma center. It matters in military settings, where care begins in the field. And it matters in the first 30 minutes after injury—what used to be called the “golden hour,” now increasingly understood as an even shorter window.
“The ability to receive point-of-injury care rapidly can make the difference between survival or death,” Brown says.
SymClot is now in preclinical development, with plans to submit an Investigational New Drug application by 2027. The path forward is clear—but it’s expensive, technical, and easy to stall out.
That’s the point where most technologies don’t make it.
For Brown’s team, the challenge isn’t proving the idea works. It’s answering the questions that come next: Can it be manufactured at scale? Is it safe? Can it meet the standards required to move into human trials?
“The safety and scale-up studies are critical for FDA filings and require significant investment,” she says.
NCInnovation funding is being used to answer those questions—supporting manufacturing scale-up, toxicology studies, and the work required to prepare for clinical trials. It’s the phase where projects either move forward or stop.
“The transformative funding from NCI is enabling our team to move closer to Phase 1 clinical trials,” Brown says. Without it, “the translation of SymClot to patients would be slowed or even stopped altogether.”
That timing matters. This funding came, as she describes it, at a pivotal moment—when the science was proven, but the path to patients depended on clearing a series of technical and regulatory hurdles.
If SymClot succeeds, the outcome is straightforward: fewer deaths from uncontrolled bleeding, faster stabilization in the field, and fewer patients arriving at hospitals already beyond saving.
For Brown, the motivation has been consistent from the start.
“The ability to create a solution for a life-or-death problem was extremely motivating for me,” she says. “The first time we saw this technology work was tremendously inspiring…and the potential to save lives continues to motivate our team.”