During the seminar, Charles Mace from Tufts University will share his view of paper-based microfluidic devices for MedTech and health. Approaches that enable patient-centric microsampling have the potential to address challenges with transporting blood samples from remote sites to clinical laboratories. However, the development of these technologies, typified by the century-old dried blood spot card, has not kept pace with the clinical need or emerging capabilities of modern laboratory medicine. 

With expertise in paper-based microfluidics, Charles Mace and colleagues have designed devices to close these gaps by providing stable and metered samples of dried blood and plasma. The researchers anticipate that these capabilities will reduce global disparities in access to healthcare, provide increased agency to patients desiring more information about their health status, and support ongoing advances in telemedicine.