We thank Drs. Rijken and Uitte de Willige (1) for their comments on our article (2). Unfortunately, we did not describe the method in all details, but we are happy to give missing details here. The urea solution used was alkaline urea, i.e., 6 mol/L urea also containing 0.25 mol/L NaOH. In fact, the treatment with urea completely dissolved the fibrin clot. After dilution with a neutral buffer, it was possible to measure antiplasmin antigen. However, we did not investigate whether or not this treatment with alkaline urea changed the response in the ELISA method. This is indeed possible, and therefore our data will not be correct regarding a true quantitation of antiplasmin in the fibrin network. However, we believe that as relative data they are still very valuable. It should be mentioned that the results were very reproducible. We are sorry that this information was not included in the original article.
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Duality of Interest. No potential conflicts of interest relevant to this article were reported.
