Challenge
Blood collection is a primary course of action for both diagnosis and monitoring of many disease areas. The recent global pandemic has highlighted the need for blood collection capabilities both in clinic and at home. Flexibility in location is an important development that saves everyone involved time and costs, and prevents exposure to contagious diseases. So what’s the challenge? Simply put, current blood collection solutions lack the accuracy, ease-of-use, and compatibility with clinical analyzers to replace the need for in-person testing.
Opportunity
The emergence of market solutions to solve for at home blood collection or ease of collection are not new. The Global Capillary Blood Collection Devices Market size was already $1.4 billion in 2019, growing at a CAGR of 6.5%+ during the forecast period 2020-2025 not considering the replacement of venipuncture by capillary blood collection, but lacks reliable data and ease of clean sampling.
Solution
The Netherlands Cancer Institute NKI-AvL developed a blood collection assist device (BCAD) that facilitates clean allows patients to collect their blood at home. This saves healthcare professionals time and disease exposure, and unburdens diagnostic centers because the samples go straight to the lab for analysis. The device is suitable for immediate use with standard hospital equipment (e.g. analyzers of market leader Roche Diagnostics). For both the diagnostic and monitoring of select diseases, blood collection assist devices reduce the need for face to face interaction with
healthcare professionals for routine tasks and improve early intervention and compliance possibilities. Initial indications targeted by SelfSafeSure will be monitoring of infectious diseases, prostate cancer and diabetes. Beyond these there are ample opportunities to expand SelfSafeSure’s
proposition and impact.
Status
A prototype is available including packaging and user instructions. Next steps will include clinical testing and verification of user experience.
Meet the team
Huub van Rossum
Inventor
Taco van der Feltz
Venture Partner at NLC
Taco joined NLC in 2015 and is a highly international and networked entrepreneur trained as Medical Doctor and Medical Biologist. He is a visionary strategist conversant within and across disciplines. As Venture Partner, Taco focuses on building innovative companies and strengthening NLC’s abilities to bring innovations to healthcare.