Capillary Blood Sampling Filter with Porous Membrane
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current blood sampling and fractionation techniques require dedicated equipment and personnel, leading to sample degradation during transportation, and existing methods for separating plasma from cells often introduce biases or fail to retain all corpuscles, affecting the representativeness and clarity of the sample for mass spectrometry analysis.
Innovation Solution
A blood sampling device using a filter with pores of 0.1 to 5 μm, devoid of clumping agents, to separate plasma from cells by capillarity, combined with an absorbent material for stabilizing and storing the plasma, allowing for efficient plasma collection and storage without lysing cells, and incorporating a matrix of needles for painless blood collection.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If conventional centrifuging techniques are used to separate plasma from blood cells, then effective separation is achieved, but dedicated equipment and qualified personnel are required, and samples must wait for many hours before analysis during which proteins degrade
Solution Approach 1:
The invention extracts the separation function from complex centrifuging equipment and implements it in a simple disposable device that can be used at the patient's location. The filter device separates plasma from cells without requiring centrifuges or specialized personnel, enabling immediate processing and eliminating the latency period for protein degradation.
2Measurement precision
If agglutinizing agents are used as separating agents, then cell separation is achieved, but varying selectivity depending on protein type creates bias in sample representativity
Solution Approach 1:
The invention uses a disposable filter device with a simple membrane structure that separates plasma from cells based on physical filtration rather than chemical agglutination. This eliminates protein-type-dependent selectivity bias and ensures representative sampling without requiring complex reagents or multiple device variants.
3Quantity of substance
If glass fiber filters are used for blood collection, then a volume of about 1 milliliter can be collected, but not all corpuscles are retained, disturbing mass spectrometer measurement clarity
Solution Approach 1:
The invention employs a porous membrane filter with optimized pore size and structure that effectively retains all blood corpuscles while allowing plasma to pass through. This achieves superior plasma clarity for mass spectrometry analysis compared to glass fiber filters, while maintaining the ability to collect adequate blood volumes.
4Quantity of substance
If several milliliters of blood are extracted for separation, then sufficient sample volume is obtained, but this is traumatic for patients and must not be repeated too often
Solution Approach 1:
The invention enables effective plasma separation from much smaller blood volumes (microliter range) compared to conventional methods requiring milliliters. This partial action approach provides sufficient plasma for analysis while dramatically reducing patient trauma and enabling more frequent sampling when clinically necessary.
Applied Scientific Principles
This section explains which scientific principles are used to turn an abstract innovation direction into a practical engineering solution.
Function Achieved in This Case
Enables efficient, painless blood sampling with minimal trauma, effective separation of plasma from cells without bias, and stable storage for subsequent analysis, reducing sample degradation and improving the accuracy of protein measurements.
Implementation Method 1
a blood sampling device using a filter with pores of 0.1 to 5 μm, devoid of clumping agents, to separate plasma from cells by capillarity
Implementation Method 2
combined with an absorbent material for stabilizing and storing the plasma
Data Source
AI summary
Disclosed herein is a device for sampling blood by capillarity for separating a plasma phase of the blood from the cell phase. The device is a strip and includes a filter having a membrane with no clumping agents, a prefilter for spreading blood over the surface of the membrane; and an absorbent paper downstream from the filter. The membrane is dimensioned to cover only a part of the surface of the prefilter and the migration of blood by capillarity within the prefilter takes place essentially lengthwise relative to the strip before blood comes into contact with the membrane.