Assessment of capillary volumetric blood microsampling for the analysis of central nervous system drugs and metabolites
Protti et al.
The finding, in our words
Capillary volumetric dried blood microsampling with hemaPEN provides a patient friendly way to obtain multiple identical samples for LC-MS/MS analysis of CNS drugs and metabolites, with satisfactory validation metrics and practical advantages for storage and extraction, enabling decentralised therapeutic drug monitoring.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
This review found that volumetric microsampling devices, such as Mitra, HemaPEN, HemaXis DB10, and Tasso-M20, overcome haematocrit bias, whilst Telimmune plasma separation cards enable direct plasma collection without centrifugation. These technologies support patient-centric, decentralised sampling, though the authors note that clinical validation remains limited across different drugs and patient populations.
This method validation for 15 cardiovascular drugs found that VAMS and Capitainer-B provided interchangeable patient results, although Capitainer-B showed higher matrix effects while VAMS exhibited stability losses for specific analytes after two weeks. The work confirms the suitability of these microsampling workflows for decentralised adherence monitoring but highlights the need for analyte-specific stability testing.
Volumetric microsampling can enable patient-centred therapeutic drug monitoring with high patient preference and acceptable method validation for many drugs, but conversion from capillary to plasma and agreement with venous sampling varies by analyte and requires careful validation.
The HematoCARD cartridge autonomously collects duplicate 10 microlitre dried blood spot samples from a single finger prick and shows good analytical performance for monitoring adalimumab, with accuracy between 91 and 111 per cent, linearity R squared 0.99 and coefficient of variation at or above 0.94 compared with serum reference and commercial DBS microsampling methods.
The study compared quantitative dried blood spot (qDBS) and volumetric absorptive microsampling (VAMS) devices for measuring ganciclovir levels in capillary blood from pediatric renal transplant recipients. This comparison provides evidence for choosing between microsampling devices in therapeutic drug monitoring, supporting decentralised sampling approaches that reduce patient burden while maintaining analytical accuracy.