Capitainer Wins Swedish Guldpillret for its qDBS self-sampling device
“Smart” card ensures blood samples collected at home fully meet the standards required for sophisticated laboratory testing
Stockholm, Sweden, October 1, 2021. Capitainer announced today that the company has received a prestigious Guldpillret (Golden Pill) award for its unique home blood sampling device. Established by Läkemedelsförsäkringen, the prize is awarded annually to highlight the need for better and safer use of medicines. Self-sampling with the Capitainer qDBS collection device has really come into own during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was deployed in northern Sweden to enable residents to send in their own blood samples in a safe and convenient way for COVID-19 testing. Studies performed by the Public Health Agency of Sweden and Region Västerbotten show that over 94% of qDBS cards returned to the lab met the quality standard required for proper clinical diagnosis.
Self-sampling using Capitainer's qDBS-card with its pre-determined level of blood (10 μl) enables not only accurate measurement of the concentration in blood of proteins and other biomarkers, but also drugs. Therefore, in addition to diagnostics, qDBS is ideal for drug treatment monitoring. Its convenience and ease of use make patients more likely to adhere to the frequent testing needed to ensure that the proper drug concentration is maintained, which is essential for drugs within a narrow therapeutic window. Furthermore, the cards can be mass-produced and distributed for large-scale population testing, broad screening programmes and longitudinal follow-up studies.
"The fact that we won “Guldpillret” among 10 nominees, is confirmation that our system for sampling dried blood has a bright future ahead with the potential to greatly improve blood sampling for diagnosing patients in healthcare" says Niclas Roxhed, associate professor at the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, in Stockholm.
The award committee’s rationale
"This year's winner is an innovative product that enables patients to provide quality-assured dried blood samples for follow-up of drug treatment. The sample is precisely volume-determined, and drug concentrations and other analytes can therefore be measured with great accuracy. The method has had a breakthrough during the pandemic and in the long term there is an even greater potential and scalability for it to be used for broad screening programs and follow-up studies in large patient populations in certain risk groups. The work demonstrates the power of collaboration between innovative, basic research and entrepreneurship1."
Christopher Aulin, CEO of Capitainer comments:
"We are extremely proud to have been awarded this prize. In collaboration with leading clinical laboratories, preparations have been under way for some time to make the sampling system widely available to the healthcare system. Our goal is to be able to offer antibody testing for Covid-19 as the first clinical indication already later this month. We collaborate with the country's largest Covid laboratory, ABC Labs. Hence, the test will be available to healthcare providers in all regions of Sweden."
About home self-sampling with qDBS
Capitainer's product Capitainer® qDBS is based on Dried Blood Spot (DBS) technology and is developed by researchers in nanotechnology at Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in collaboration with researchers from Karolinska Institute. Unlike other DBS-based solutions, qDBS ensures an accurate amount of blood, providing more reliable analytical results and enabling more applications. The sampling card can be transported to a laboratory by regular mail without the need for refrigeration or special packaging.
Contacts
Christopher Aulin, CEO, 0708 977 577 aulin@capitainer.se.
Niclas Roxhed, Associate Professor, Royal Institute of Technology, 070-744 24 17 roxhed@kth.se
Media
Richard Hayhurst/Ola Björkman
About Capitainer
Capitainer AB is a Swedish Medtech company founded in 2013 by Professor Olof Beck from the Department of Clinical Pharmacology at the Karolinska Institute and Professors Göran Stemme, Asso. Prof. Niclas Roxhed and PhD Gabriel Lenk from the division of Micro- and Nanosystems at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden and business consultant Peter Bräutigam.
Capitainer is a supplier of intelligent solutions for Dried Blood and Plasma Spot sampling serving several market segments, including but not limited, to Therapeutic Drug Monitoring, Drug Development and Drugs of Abuse and Alcohol testing. By using a combination of paper- and polymer microfluidics the precision and accuracy of metering of capillary blood is on par with that of a standard displacement pipette. Thus, the technology enables more convenient solutions for healthcare sampling and patients’ home sampling ensuring more reliable test results for healthcare and other providers of tests based on blood or plasma.
For more information visit www.capitainer.se
About “Guldpillret”
The first “Guldpillret” was awarded in 2010. The prize was established by Swedish Läkemedelsförsäkringen and is awarded in collaboration with Dagens Medicin and Apoteksmarknaden. The purpose of the prize is to draw attention to the need for better and safer use of medicines to reduce the risk of harmful effects of drugs.
The winners receive a prize amount of SEK 100,000.
1Professor Lars K Gustafsson has not participated in the decision to reward Capitainer due to conflict of interest.
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