Blood sampling doesn’t have to be complicated. For decades, Dried Blood Spots (DBS) have offered a simple, scalable alternative to traditional blood plasma collection. However, the use of Dried Blood Spots in advanced untargeted metabolomics has been limited by concerns around stability and depth of data. Panome Bio is set to change that.
Why Dried Blood Spots?
Dried Blood Spot sampling is fast, minimally invasive, and requires just a drop of blood collected via finger prick onto a filter paper or a blood spot card of your choice. There are no tubes, no cold storage, and far less plastic waste involved. It’s already a go-to method in newborn screening, chronic disease monitoring, and pharmacokinetics. So why not also in clinical diagnostics, personalized medicine, early cancer detection or public health surveillance, wherever biological information is needed.
But could it reliably support untargeted metabolomics at the depth of today’s research demands? Panome Bio’s recent study proves it can.
Using Next-Generation Metabolomics and utilizing liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS), DBS cards across three critical metrics were evaluated: Coverage, Stability and Concordance. Coverage refers to the number of metabolites detected in a sample type compared to a gold standard, like Plasma. Stability assesses how well metabolites are preserved in a sample over time and under specific conditions. This is crucial for DBS, as it’s often collected in remote settings and shipped without refrigeration. Concordance evaluates whether a less traditional sampling method, like DBS, accurately reflects biological changes observed in a standard sampling method, such as Plasma. This ensures that any biological insights gained from Dried Blood Spots are truly representative of what’s happening in the body.
The study demonstrated that DBS metabolomics, when analyzed with Panome Bio’s Next Generation Metabolomics platform, provides high-quality, reliable, and biologically meaningful data:
- Coverage: DBS captured ~94% of the metabolites detected in plasma, demonstrating strong biological relevance.
- Stability: Over 95% of metabolites remained stable after 96 hours at room temperature, showcasing the robustness of DBS for sample collection and transport.
- Concordance: Changes in metabolite levels between fasted and fed states were clearly observed in DBS, mirroring plasma results and underscoring the platforms sensitivity to dynamic physiological changes.
In short: DBS metabolomics works, and it works exceptionally well with Panome Bio’s Next Generation Metabolomics platform.
Figure 1: Heatmap of Case Study representing over 95% metabolite stability in DBS samples at 24- and 96-hours post-collection.
What This Means for You:
Panome Bio’s untargeted metabolomics unlocks powerful metabolic insights from Dried Blot Spot samples with minimal disruption to your workflow. Whether you’re running large cohort studies, field-based trials, or longitudinal research, DBS offers:
- Scalable, low-cost sampling
- Room temperature stability, no cold chain required
- High sensitivity to dynamic physiological changes
- Plasma comparable metabolite coverage
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