Powerful supercomputer simulations help Michael Graham understand blood flow in sickle cell disease

Blood is often pictured as a smooth, continuous stream, but in reality it behaves more like rush-hour traffic in a dense city with crowded lanes, sudden merges and countless tiny intersections where direction and speed change instantly. For most people, those arterial roadways manage this traffic gracefully.

For people living with sickle cell disease (SCD), however, the circulation is under constant strain. Much of the harm happens quietly in the body’s smallest blood vessels, where red blood cells must bend, slide and divide into branching pathways to keep tissues alive. When this choreog