Professor Robin Condliffe

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497 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 7 Jul

Professor Robin Condliffe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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What's Up Docs? · Doctors' Notes: Lungs Special at Crossed Wires Festival · 7 Jul 2026 podcast

It's so narrow that each red blood cell has to queue up and go very slowly next to the alveoli.

And that is where we pick up oxygen into those red blood cells and where carbon dioxide is excreted.

Those blood vessels also filter the lungs.

We all create little clots all the time from our blood vessels, and those blood vessels are very good at also filtering the lungs.

Can you unpack that, Robin?

Not big clots, but all the time you damage a bang of a vein, then it will damage the vessel wall, and it will create a little bit of a thrombosis.

And we're in a tension between making clots and dissolving clots.

Now, these are tiny things, but some people...

don't have that filtering process so you might have someone who's got a hole in the heart and so blood can go from the right side of the heart to the left side of the heart without going through the lungs or you might have someone who has an abnormal connection between an artery and a vein in the lungs so they don't have a perfect filtering process so they are at increased risk of strokes so those tiny little things can go through into the left side of the heart

Out the left side of the heart, if you take the first left on the way out of the left side of the heart, go to the brain.

So it just shows you the importance of the filtering process, yeah.

They do have other functions.

Platelets, they're related to blood.

So platelets are the things in blood which make clots.

So if you do need to make a clot inside your body, you need platelets.

And the lungs mature platelets.

So platelets are produced in the bone marrow and they hang around in the lungs and they are matured into fully functioning platelets.

So other features, other functions, not just breathing and filtering.

But it's fair to say breathing and taking in oxygen and getting rid of carbon dioxide is clearly the main function.

Yeah.

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