In this review, we present anticoagulants and inhibitors of platelet aggregation isolated from hematophagous animals. These animals have to inhibit, at the site of injury, the host hemostasis in order to blood-feed and maintain the blood fluid inside their digestive tract. During evolution, hematophagous animals developed a diversity of anti-homeostatic substances that are injected into the host through their saliva and that are crucial to successful parasitism. These anti-homeostatic substances could be used as tools in vascular physiology investigation and they also have potential therapeutic applications.
Hematophagous; saliva; anticoagulant; antiplatelet
