The fibrinogen turns into fibrin, an insoluble, filamentous protein which traps the platelets and causes them to link up into a quilt that helps stop bleeding.

ECONOMIST: Monitor

The clever bit was that the receiving nanoparticles, which carried the pharmaceutical payload, were doped with protein fragments that bind to fibrin and thus to the wound-stanching quilts that form when the heat from the gold nanorods does its work.

ECONOMIST: Monitor

One idea he and his colleagues are working on is to fight blood clots which cause strokes and heart attacks by filling bubbles with an anticoagulant, and coating them with antibodies that like to attach themselves to fibrin (the protein that gums up the blood when it clots).

ECONOMIST: The ne plus ultra of medicine