TECHNOLOGY RENEWS A BASIC APPROACH

COLLECTING DROPS of blood from patients and depositing them on cards, where they dry, has been used for decades as a method to screen newborns for errors of metabolism and to screen for infectious disease. Despite that long history, the technique is only now gaining momentum as a method pharmaceutical companies use to determine the fate of drugs in the bodies of patients. “This is a classic case of a new idea that’s 40 years old,” says Richard M. LeLacheur, vice president at PharmaNet USA, a contract research organization (CRO) in Princeton, N.J. Dried blood spots had been a nonstarter for pharmaceutical analysis because analytical instruments were not sensitive enough for the quantitative analysis needed to obtain pharmacokinetic data from such tiny samples. In neonatal screening, in contrast, clinicians just need to find out whether something is present, not how much. But in the past few years, improvements in the sensitivity of analytical instruments, especially ...