Combining Attana’s advanced biosensor system with Capitainer’s DBS home sampling makes immune profiling and vaccine efficacy monitoring possible in broad patient populations
Stockholm, Sweden, February 11th, 2022. Swedish bio- and healthtech companies Attana AB and Capitainer AB have signed an agreement with the goal of offering broader and more patient-centric blood sampling solutions for the Attana AVATM system starting with COVID-19 immune profiling.
Since November 2021, Attana has been performing comparative studies of finger stick capillary blood samples simultaneously collected by both test tubes and Capitainer®qDBS cards (quantitative dried blood spot) for analysis in Attana’s AVATM system. These serological studies have shown high specificity and sensitivity with good reproducibility for both sampling methods.
Because of the ease of use and sampling accuracy, Attana and Capitainer have now initiated a collaboration to clinically validate Capitainer’s patented qDBS cards in combination with the Attana CE IVD-marked SARS-CoV-2 Immunoassay kit. In the coming months, the parties intend to perform an expanded patient study within the framework of Attana’s ongoing Covid study with Linnaeus University and Region Kalmar. The objective is to expand Attana´s CE IVD marking to include sampling of capillary blood (qDBS and test tubes), in addition to current serum samples.
The combination of Capitainer®qDBS and the AVATM platform enables distributed, simple, and quality-assured sampling for information rich immunity profiling by combining two innovative Swedish technologies. The patented Capitainer collection device offers blood sampling of exact volumes, which is of great importance in quantitative antibody analyses where the amount of antibodies in a sample is to be measured. Since the Capitainer cards are designed for patient self-sampling, they allow for blood sampling to be carried out over wider geographies and with greater frequency, without significantly affecting sampling costs.
Samir Fostock, Head of Attana Diagnostics comments:
“During the pandemic, standard diagnostic sampling has been particularly challenging in patient studies which call for multiple testing, often also across wide geographic areas. In addition to an ongoing need for COVID-19 immunity and vaccine efficacy studies, there is much to suggest that the need for remote sampling will continue to grow in the coming years within clinical diagnostics, drug development, as well as in academic research fields such as immunology and virology. The Attana AVAsystem in combination with Capitainer qDBS will be able to offer our customers and their patients high quality diagnostic analyses in a wider scope of studies than possible today.”
Mikael Ström, Business Development Manager Capitainer adds:
“Capitainer’s solution for quantitative self-sampling enables clinical standard blood samples to be easily taken at home and sent by regular mail to the laboratory for analysis. During the pandemic our sampling solution was validated in several studies and there is a large demand for new analyses which are performed using small sample volumes. The Attana AVA system offers advanced diagnostics and is an ideal fit with Capitainer’s ambition to develop analysis solutions from samples that can be taken at home. This collaboration will help to make these new analyses available to patients irrespective of how far they live from a laboratory.”
For more information, please contact:
Teodor Aastrup, CEO Attana AB
teodor.aastrup@attana.com
+ 46 8 674 57 00
Christopher Aulin, CEO
+46 (0) 708 977 577
About Attana
Attana was founded in 2002 with the vision of in vitro characterization of molecular interactions mimicking in vivo conditions. Since then, Attana has developed proprietary label free biosensors for biochemical, crude, sera, and cell-based assays and the Attana Virus Analytics (AVA) platform, a proprietary in vitro diagnostics (IVD) tool. Attana products and research services are used by Big Pharma, biotech companies and academic institutions within the life sciences. To learn more about our latest services and products, please visit www.attana.com or contact sales@attana.com
About Capitainer
Capitainer AB was founded in 2013 and is a supplier of intelligent solutions for collecting an exact amount of blood or plasma during capillary sampling and then saving the samples in dried form. The application is available in many market segments, including but not limited to, therapeutic drug monitoring, biomarkers, genomics, drug development, drug abuse testing and doping. The company has a well-defined go-to-market strategy for new regions and a team with solid experience of sales and business development in life science.
For more information visit https://capitainer.com/
About home sampling with qDBS
Capitainer’s product qDBS is based on Dried Blood Spot (DBS) technology and is developed by researchers in nanotechnology at Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in collaboration with researchers from Karolinska Institute. Unlike other DBS-based solutions, qDBS ensures an accurate amount of blood, providing more reliable analytical results and enabling more applications. The sampling card can be transported to a laboratory by regular mail without the need for refrigeration or special packaging.
Contacts
Christopher Aulin, CEO t: +46 708 977 577 e:aulin@capitainer.se
Media
Richard Hayhurst/Ola Bjorkman
Notes to editors
Capitainer AB is a Swedish Medtech company founded in 2013 by Professor Olof Beck from the Department of Clinical Pharmacology at the Karolinska Institute and Professors Göran Stemme, Asso. Prof. Niclas Roxhed and PhD Gabriel Lenk from the division of Micro- and Nanosystems at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden and business consultant Peter Bräutigam.
Capitainer is a supplier of intelligent solutions for Dried Blood and Plasma Spot sampling serving several market segments, including but not limited, to Therapeutic Drug Monitoring, Drug Development and Drugs of Abuse and Alcohol testing. By using a combination of paper- and polymer microfluidics the precision and accuracy of metering of capillary blood is on par with that of a standard displacement pipette. Thus, the technology enables more convenient solutions for healthcare sampling and patients’ home sampling ensuring more reliable test results for healthcare and other providers of tests based on blood or plasma.
For more information visit www.capitainer.se
