0 Comments
You are here: Home › Applications Overview › Dried Blood Spot Analysis - A Fully Automated System

Dried Blood Spot Analysis - A Fully Automated System

Jan. 13, 2012
V. Yakobchuk - Fotolia.com
V. Yakobchuk - Fotolia.com more
V. Yakobchuk - Fotolia.com Fig. 1: Illustration of the concept for an automated DBS handling and extraction system. Step 1: Robotics for picking up and replacing of DBS cards Step 3: Internal standard application Step 4: Direct extraction module Step 5: Wash station 
PDF-FileClick here, to read the PDF-file (pdf-file 346.72 KB)

Dried Blood Spot (DBS) Analysis has become during the last few years a hot topic in bioanalytics for many reasons: Less blood per sample, easier logistics due to longer shelf life, non-hazardous samples, storage at ambient temperature... and finally reduced costs. Ethically the replacement, reduction and refinement of animal testing (the so-called ‘3Rs') are a permanent issue and DBS is fully in-line with those aims.

This article will take a closer look at the progress achieved towards a fully automated system for routine DBS analysis.

Introduction

Bioanalytics of DBS cards by LC-MS/MS are a challenging task and many aspects have to be considered in order to obtain reliable results. Associated processes are e.g. standardized and reproducible blood spotting, compensation of different unwanted effects using an internal standard (IS) for normalization, accurate spot localization to precisely select the centre of the blood spots, reproducible and efficient extraction of analytes from DBS cards, minimal carryover, and many issues more. So far, those processes have neither been automated nor integrated into a fully automatic system. Today DBS-analysis still involves many cumbersome manual steps (spot centring, punching...) which are neither well controlled nor automated and which generate a significant amount of manual work.

Read more within the pdf on DBS Analysis.

Authors:
Matthias Loppacher, Camag, Muttenz, Switzerland
Christoph Fankhauser, Camag, Muttenz, Switzerland
Klaus Schetter, Camag, Muttenz, Switzerland
Urs Schranz, Camag, Muttenz, Switzerland

Related Articles :

Keywords : Analysis Process Automation Bioanalytic Camag Christoph Fankhauser DBS DBS-analysis DBS-MS 500 Diagnostics direct extraction module Dried Blood Spot extraction system Internal standard application Klaus Schetter KTI/CTI LC-MS/MS Matthias Loppacher optical spot localization Robotics Screnning Application Note Urs Schrans

Email requestCompany Homepage

Camag AG
Sonnenmattstr. 11
4132 Muttenz
Switzerland

Web: http://www.camag.ch

RSS Newsletter