Newswise — Spark Holland B.V. is pleased to announce the publication of US patent no. US 8586382 B2 which relates to a method and an apparatus for desorption of a blood sample from a medical test sheet comprising at least one dried blood spot (DBS) for the purpose of biomedical analysis of the blood sample. The patent allows that the new method eliminates the need for first punching out a disc area of the test sheet containing dried blood sample, thus speeding up the procedure considerably and that on-line desorption of dried blood spots is faster and easier and allows for further automation of the process.

This new technique – Spark’s innovative Flow-through desorption (FTD™) technology, forms the basis of its revolutionary new DBS Autosampler for the preparation of dried blood spots, or other biological liquid samples, e.g. urine, on DBS cards for analysis by mass spec or other analytical techniques without any manual intervention.

Rob van der Knaap, President Spark Holland BV, commented, “The granting of this patent confirms yet again the innovation and technological achievements of Spark. Our aim is to always lead the way in automated front-end sample preparation. Our patented Flow-through desorption technology now offers an advantage over other systems and offers possibilities for speeding up and complete automation of analysis in the clinical and drug discovery laboratory. We plan to showcase our revolutionary DBSA at all major exhibitions this year and look forward to working with OEM, existing and new partners in the clinical and pharmaceutical areas.”

US 8586382 B2 (also published as EP2330402A1, US20110129940).

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&RefSrch=yes&Query=PN/8586382-ends-For further information, please visit www.sparkholland.com or contact [email protected].For further press information, please contact Reita Smith from Conscience Creative at [email protected].