Painless Capillary Blood Collection: A Rapid Evaluation of the Onflow Device.

Blood-based diagnostics are critical for many medical decisions, but mostly rely on venepuncture, which can be inconvenient and painful. The Onflow Serum Gel (Loop Medical SA, Vaud, Lausanne, Switzerland) is a novel blood collection device that utilises needle-free technology to collect capillary blood. In this pilot study, 100 healthy participants were enrolled and provided two Onflow collected specimens and one venous blood specimen.

Chamber and microfluidic probe for microperfusion of organotypic brain slices.

Microfluidic systems are increasingly being used for the culture and study of dissociated cells because they require only minute amounts of materials while enabling drug screening and chemotaxis studies down to the single cell level. However, the culture of organized tissue, such as brain slices, has been more difficult to adapt to microfluidic devices. Here, we present a microfluidic system, comprising (i) a perfusion chamber for the culture of organotypic slices that is compatible with high resolution imaging on inverted microscopes, and (ii) a novel transparent microfluidic probe (MFP) for the localized microperfusion of the brain tissue.