Improved Dried Biological Specimen Materials, Recovery and Processing for Diagnostics

Dried blood spot (DBS) analysis has gained recognition in recent years in basic science and clinical diagnostics. This impetus relies upon its numerous advantages over the collection, transport and storage of blood samples obtained by conventional venipuncture. Although there is wide-spread interest in DBS, optimization of sample collection and extraction methods, as well as, the subsequent analyses by standard analytical methods is still in its infancy. Therefore, preliminary experiments comparing different extraction methods (e.g. alcohol incubation and electrospray transfer) were carried out and analyzed by enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). We propose that electrospray ionization-transfer offers superior extraction to that of the standard chemical methods by 1) efficient extraction of analytes from the DBS substrate and 2) concentration of the analyte.