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Stents are used by heart surgeons to open up blood vessels that have got clogged.
心臟外科醫生可用支架打開堵塞的血管。
They are extremely effective at keeping people alive, but do attract the attention of the immune system, causing inflammation of the tissues around them, which results in scarring.
它們在維持人的生命方面非常有效，但確實會吸引免疫系統的注意，導致周圍組織發炎，從而導致疤痕形成。
If enough scar tissue forms, that can itself impede blood flow.
如果形成了足夠多的疤痕組織，就會阻礙血液流動。
Worse, it can result in part of the scar breaking off and causing a stroke or pulmonary embolism.
更糟糕的是，它可能導致部分疤痕脫落，導致中風或肺血栓。
Over the past two decades, types of stent have been designed that slowly release anti-inflammatory drugs and so reduce these risks.
在過去的二十年里，設計的支架類型可以緩慢釋放抗炎藥物，從而降低這些風險。
But success is not guaranteed, and the consequences of failure are severe.
但不能保證成功，失敗的后果是嚴重的。
The team coated their experimental stents by dipping them in a solution of dopamine and a substance called sodium periodate.
研究小組將他們的實驗支架浸泡在多巴胺和高碘酸鈉溶液中，從而可以在支架上涂上一層。
They then charged the coated stent to an appropriate negative voltage and dropped a suspension of “platelet-derived extracellular vesicles” (small bubbles of membrane that platelets can be induced to cough up by appropriate treatment) onto it, before incubating it at 37°C for a couple of hours.
然后，他們將涂層支架充電到適當的負電壓，并在支架上滴上一層“血小板衍生的細胞外囊泡”(通過適當的處理可以誘導血小板咳出的小膜泡)，然后在37℃下孵育幾個小時。
This done, examination with a microscope indicated that the stent was indeed covered in platelet membrane.
顯微鏡檢查表明，支架確實被血小板膜覆蓋。
But, to be sure the immune-shielding proteins were still there, the team used two special techniques, immunofluorescence and western blotting, to check for their presence.
但是，為了確保免疫屏蔽蛋白仍然存在，研究小組使用了兩種特殊技術--免疫熒光和蛋白質印跡法--來檢查它們是否存在。
The acid test, however, was to try out the stents in animals.
然而，關鍵的測試是在動物身上試驗支架。
To that end they picked a group of rabbits and implanted into their abdominal aortas stents which had no coating, stents coated only in polydopamine, and stents which had also had platelet membranes attached to them.
為此，他們挑選了一組兔子，將沒有涂層的支架、只涂有聚多巴胺的支架和有血小板膜附著的支架植入它們的腹主動脈。
After eight hours, they removed some of the stents and looked for a build-up of inflammatory cells.
八個小時后，他們取出了一些支架，并尋找炎性細胞的積聚。
They left the rest in place, allowed the animals to recover from the surgery, and then let them go about their lives for a month before killing them and collecting their stents for analysis.
其余的繼續保留，讓動物從手術中恢復過來，然后讓它們繼續生活一個月，然后殺死它們，收集它們的支架進行分析。
As expected, even after eight hours, let alone a month, the uncoated and the polydopamine-coated stents were saturated in cell growth triggered by immune activity.
正如預期的那樣，即使在八個小時后，未涂層支架和多巴胺涂層支架在免疫活動引發的細胞生長中已經飽和，更不用說一個月了。
On both occasions, however, the membrane-coated stents were clean.
然而，在這兩種情況下，覆膜支架都是干凈的。
Translating this preliminary result in rabbits into a clinical application in human beings will be a hard graft, as it were.
可以說，將這一在兔子身上的初步結果轉化為對人類的臨床應用將是一項艱巨的嫁接。
How long the coating will last remains unknown.
涂層將持續多長時間尚不清楚。
And rabbits are not people, so the details of their physiologies are different.
兔子不是人，所以它們的生理細節是不同的。
But as a start, Dr Wang’s work is remarkable, for it opens a whole, new avenue of investigation into the problem of sustaining medical implants.
但首先，王博士的工作成果是顯著的，因為它為研究維持醫療植入物的問題開辟了一條全新的途徑。
