40-year-old test procedure finds modern niche in developing new medicines
C&EN Senior Editor Celia Henry Arnaud notes that collecting drops of blood from patients and depositing the drops on special paper cards to dry has been used for decades to screen newborns for hereditary disorders and infectious disease. But the dried blood spot technology has found a new role at pharmaceutical companies in the development and testing of new drugs.
The approach, possible now because modern lab instruments are more sensitive, has distinct advantages. The dried blood approach, for instance, involves taking only a few drops of blood from patients in clinical trials, and these can be stored and shipped more easily and inexpensively than liquid samples. Those advantages, alone, could cut the cost of introducing new drugs by millions of dollars, the article indicates.
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