Pain-free blood sampling device that uses capillary action, developed by Tasso Inc.
Tasso Inc., a company with the University of Wisconsin-Madison aims to make blood sampling less painful and more convenient. The company was started by three people who studied microfluidics and wanted to use what they had learned to help people and to make products that are useful. They are, Ben Moga, the president, Ben Casavant, the vice president and Erwin Berthier, the head of research and development.
The company is working on perfecting a device the size of a ping-pong ball that extracts a small sample while held against the skin for two minutes.
On holding the device against the skin, a slight vacuum in the device enables a small sample of blood to flow into an attached sample tube, which can be mailed or handed to a lab. The technology relies on the forces that govern the flow of tiny fluid streams. Blood is kept in the channel no matter how you hold the device. This is because, at these scales, surface tension dominates over gravity. Users report that the process is almost entirely painless.
Casavant says that moving the blood in open channels rather than traditional closed channels will simplify manufacturing and cut costs for a disposable device that needs as few as six injection-molded plastic parts.
Currently, the device can extract about 0.15 of a cubic centimeter, enough to test cholesterol, infection, cancer cells and blood sugar. But, the company is not focusing on diabetics as an initial market even though they must test their blood sugar several times a day. This is because those tests are inexpensive. The company is focusing on people who need to test semi-frequently, or infrequently, for example, to monitor cancer or chronic infectious diseases. Instead of buying a machine or expensive equipment, this device can be shipped to them, and they can put it on their arm for two minutes and send it back to the lab. The device could also help those who fear blood draws, and avoid time-consuming trips to labs for blood draws.
The company has now applied for a patent on channels that create capillary action to move blood toward the sample tube. As a startup, the investors had been skeptical initially. But the recent government grants have marked a transition at Tasso. Now, investors are taking them seriously and the company hopes to send its application to the Food and Drug Administration at the end of 2015, and reach the market during 2016.
