2022 · Journal of pharmaceutical analysis · open access
Potential use of a dried saliva spot (DSS) in therapeutic drug monitoring and disease diagnosis
Han et al.
The finding, in our words
The review summarises dried saliva spot method developments between 2014 and 2021, noting saliva’s convenience for children and disabled persons as an alternative matrix to serum for therapeutic drug monitoring and disease diagnosis, while emphasising that sample preparation and validation challenges remain before widespread decentralised adoption.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
Dried saliva collected with the Mitra device correlated strongly with wet saliva but poorly with plasma unbound and total concentrations, indicating it is not a reliable substitute for plasma in routine therapeutic drug monitoring of mycophenolic acid and its glucuronide metabolite. Capillary blood collected via VAMS remains a promising alternative for long term monitoring in paediatric patients.
This study found that volumetric absorptive microsampling shows satisfactory agreement with venous plasma for monitoring several antiseizure medications in paediatric patients. However, a blood-to-plasma conversion factor was required to estimate plasma concentrations for clobazam and carbamazepine metabolites due to poor capillary-to-plasma interchangeability.
Simeoli et al., Pharmaceuticals (paywalled) · source ↗
This study employed volumetric absorptive microsampling to collect blood samples from neonates, revealing that existing propofol pharmacokinetic models poorly predicted drug levels in this population. A newly developed meta-model provided accurate predictions, validating the use of patient-centric microsampling for therapeutic drug monitoring in preterm and term infants.
Rantanen et al., European journal of pharmaceutical sciences : official journal of the European Federation for Pharmaceutical Sciences (paywalled) · source ↗
This study validated a method for monitoring mycophenolic acid in paediatric patients, demonstrating that quantitative dried plasma spots achieved close agreement with venous plasma. Quantitative dried blood spots showed significant haematocrit-related bias, making the plasma-based format more suitable for decentralised monitoring.
Kocur et al., Journal of chromatography. B, Analytical technologies in the biomedical and life sciences (paywalled) · source ↗
This review establishes that microsampling across blood, saliva, urine and stool matrices offers validated workflows and regulatory recognition for human biomonitoring comparable to conventional methods. It finds that these decentralised approaches enhance participant acceptability and enable screening in remote or low-resource settings.