NEW YORK – Swedish start-up Capitainer on Wednesday announced that it has closed on SEK 15 million ($1.6 million) in financing to support the commercialization of its dried-blood-spot sampling product, Capitainer qDBS.
Nordic Consumer Health and the US-based Wolf Family Trust led the issue of shares, and a consortium of Nordic angel investors and Capitainer management also participated in the financing.
The Capitainer qDBS solution is being developed to ensure that an exact sample volume of 10µl of blood is collected, the Stockholm-based firm said, and to enable convenient and quantitative blood sampling at the fingertip.
Patients place a blood drop on a card that automatically fills a microchannel with the required amount of blood and discards any excess, eliminating the potential for human error. The blood volume contained in the microchannel automatically flows to pre-punched dried-blood-spot paper, forming an accurate and high-quality dried-blood-spot sample preserved for quantitative analysis, the company said. The filled card can then be safely transported to the laboratory for analysis without the need for refrigeration or specialized packaging.
Capitainer blood sampling delivers cost savings, improved healthcare efficiency, an improved patient experience, and reduced environmental impact, Capitainer said. "With the fast-growing demands for home sampling, we strongly believe that capillary blood will increasingly be seen as a viable and preferable alternative to venous blood," Christopher Aulin, CEO of Capitainer, said in a statement. "Over the last 12 months, we have seen a growing interest in Capitainer qDBS for both existing and new applications such as therapeutic drug monitoring, genomics, and screening applications."