Tasso, Inc — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: SB122-003

Description

Blood-based point-of-care (POC) diagnostics or remote diagnostics that require specialized equipment only available in centralized, commercial laboratories are currently limited by major logistical and technical barriers. Blood collection can be a traumatic, inconvenient, and inconsistent process that is based on decades-old technologies, such as the lancet-puncture, that are not amenable to new POC diagnostic approaches, remote blood analysis methods, emergency response settings, or military deployment environments. To give patients in the field access to phlebotomists and to transport their blood samples to centralized laboratories currently incurs substantial costs. To answer these challenges, Tasso is developing a safe, user-friendly, and disposable blood collection and sample preparation device, called the HemoLink, that is self-administered at the POC, is inexpensive, can collect customizable, yet precise volumes of blood from 100 L to 1 mL, and can be easily shipped to a central laboratory without risk of degradation, thus enabling the measurement of even low-abundance biomarkers. With the accessibility and ease-of-use of the HemoLink, doctors will obtain an unsurpassed level of diagnostic fidelity, allowing them to monitor and treat patients with an expanded range of diseases more accurately and quickly at the POC.