NEWS AND VIEWS 29 April 2026 Red blood cells have been modified to form strong clots that halt any bleeding almost instantly and then promote tissue regeneration. By Malcolm Xing Malcolm Xing is in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Price Faculty of Engineering, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg R3T 5V6, Canada. Gaoxing Luo Gaoxing Luo is at the Institute of Burn Research, Southwest Hospital, Chongqing, China. Blood in the body’s vascular system sustains life, but when it escapes, it must rapidly form a solid protective barrier — a clot — to prevent fatal outcomes. However, because natural blood clots are notoriously slow to form, severe bleeding resulting from accidents, battlefield injuries and surgical complications causes many potentially preventable deaths. Writing in Nature , Jiang et al . 1 report a bioengineering advance that addresses this challenge by fundamentally altering the architecture of blood clots.…