Microsampling: A role to play in Covid-19 diagnosis, surveillance, treatment and clinical trials
Rajadhyaksha & Londhe
The finding, in our words
Microsampling enables remote, contactless self-collection for Covid-19 serology and therapeutic drug monitoring, reducing infection risk and clinical staff burden while maintaining accuracy through validated assays. This supports decentralised clinical trials and population-level surveillance during a pandemic.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
This narrative review surveys remote biospecimen collection products for sexual health research, including dried blood spots and volumetric absorptive microsampling, and concludes that successful implementation needs a multidisciplinary, participant-centred team with sufficient time allocated to the complexities of collection procedures and processes.
Most telehealth-supervised, participant-collected saliva, oropharyngeal swab, and dried blood spot specimens were judged suitable and biologically sufficient for SARS-CoV-2 RNA and serology testing in a pilot cohort. This validates decentralised, patient-centric microsampling for infectious disease screening.
In AML and CLL, 91% of VAMS venetoclax results fell within 20% of plasma after individualised haematocrit correction; in home sampling, 18 of 21 patients self-sampled independently and 76% of returned samples were analysable, which shows home microsampling is workable, though the authors ask for multicentre validation.
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.
The study validated a semi-quantitative protocol for Epstein-Barr virus serology using dried blood spots, demonstrating 98.8% sensitivity and 96.5% specificity compared to paired venous serum samples. The successful validation in a self-sampling cohort confirms the suitability of this patient-centric microsampling approach for large-scale seroprevalence studies and decentralised trials.