A group of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison are gearing towards creating a less painful blood sampling device with just a size of a pingpong ball which can extract blood for simple tests within two minutes. The researchers are also associated with the company Tasso Inc.
Tasso Inc., which is associated with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, received an additional $3 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to advance its product, reports Science Daily.
This product which vacuums blood from the skin without puncturing it may soon replace needles, representatives from Tasso, Inc. said. Instead of pulling the blood from veins, which are closed channels, the device pulls it from the open channels in which blood flows through many microscopic vessels called capillaries, reports CTV News.
According to Ben Casavant, Vice President and Co-founder of Tasso, Inc., the patient should not feel any pain and microfluidics, the technology behind the pain-free blood sampling method, would facilitate the flow of fluid streams from the capillaries.
"At these scales, surface tension dominates over gravity, and that keeps the blood in the channel no matter how you hold the device," Casavant told CTV News.
The said device can pull around 0.15 cubic centimeter of blood within two minutes that is ample to test for cholesterol, cancer cells and infection levels in the blood. However, this test cannot be applied to HIV testing yet though the company is in the process of developing one for the said blood test.
With the money granted to the company, they will work on manufacturing more devices for public use and develop invasive procedures into more painless ones. The company is aiming to pass their application for approval to the United States Food and Drug Administration by 2016.
With current technological innovations in science and medicine, it is not impossible for tests to become less invasive in the future.
