Intravascular oxygen delivery holds great potential to treat numerous hypoxic conditions and emergencies, including pulmonary disorders, hypoxic tumors, hemorrhagic shock, stroke, cardiac arrest and so on. Tremendous effort has been made in the past to find material solutions for the development of intravenous oxygen carriers and have ranged from blood substitutes to microbubbles with limited success. This paper highlights previous and recent progress in perfluorocarbon-emulsions and microbubbles as intravenous gas carriers, including concerns over their long-term stability, in vivo safety profiles, and oxygen transport efficacy. Their use as potential resuscitative therapeutics for treating various types of cardiac arrest is also discussed.
Keywords: blood substitutes; cardiac arrest; intravascular oxygen delivery; microbubbles; polymeric biomaterials.
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