towards the end of blood tests with needles?

The American firm, Becton, Dickinson and Co seems to have found an alternative to needles in the veins with technology involving the scalp.

The last person to propose putting an end to traditional blood tests was Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, the star start-up of Silicon Valley, launched in the early 2000s. She was presented as Steve’s heir Jobs and she even wore black turtlenecks like him. She found herself on the front page of magazines with her technology which promised to carry out blood tests at low cost and almost painlessly.

The company was valued at nine billion dollars. Except that in 2015, the journalist from Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou, son of the former TF1 journalist, Gérard Carreyrou, revealed that the technology did not work and that Elizabeth Holmes had covered up this failure. She was sentenced to 11 and a half years in prison in 2022 after a high-profile trial. The affair even gave rise to a mini-series, The Dropout.

This time, the company behind this new technology is respected and it is not an unknown start-up. Becton, Dickinson and Co has been in existence for over a century. During the pandemic, it produced Covid kits to test yourself at home, for example.

Pain-free technology

Its device, called the BD MiniDraw Collection System, allows you to take a blood sample, not by sticking a needle into the vein, which can be scary, or even a little painful, but by taking six to 18 drops of blood. in the scalp, almost without pain. The FDA, the American drug agency, has given the green light and in theory, there is no need to go to a laboratory since a pharmacist could take care of it. The blood test could be used to measure cholesterol levels or high blood pressure, for example.

The technology is therefore promising, especially since it is a market estimated at five billion dollars by the firm Allied Market Research and this is important because 70% of clinical decisions are based on test results. blood samples, according to Becton, Dickinson and Co. It is not impossible that one day the technology, apparently very easy to use, will allow patients to take this type of samples themselves. They would then no longer have to travel to a laboratory, which is not always easy to access in rural regions and even less so in poor countries.

Meanwhile, the device is mainly used to measure blood lipids and the proportion of red blood cells, very common blood tests. But the laboratory does not rule out working on more complex measurements and why not, in the longer term, diagnosing certain cancers.