NEW DELHI, June 3 (Xinhua) -- Indian scientists have discovered that silver particles could emerge a potential new alternative to aspirin and other anti-platelet agents used widely to prevent blood clots in coronary artery disease, heart attack and stroke, local tabloid Mail Today said Wednesday.

    The new drug is actually a dose of extremely tiny silver particles -- nearly 50,000 times smaller than diameter of a human hair -- injected into the bloodstream, said the report.

    Researchers led by Debabrata Das at the Institute of Medical Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, have made the discovery.

    Blood thinning drugs sometimes cause dangerous bleeding, researchers said.

    Therefore, scientists have been looking for drugs that can regulate activity of platelets which form clots in blood. They have developed and tested silver nano particles that seem to keep platelets in an inactive state.

    The effect of silver nano particles was tested on platelets isolated from fresh human blood as in mice.

    Low levels of the nano silver, injected into mice, reduced the ability of platelets to clump together by as much as 40 percent with no harmful side-effects.