Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI
- Needle-free devices like TAP and Tasso offer painless blood collection, a benefit for the squeamish.These tests face challenges with sample size and accuracy compared to traditional methods.This article is part of "Transforming Treatments," a series on medical innovations that save time, money, or discomfort.
Dr. Zev Williams, the chief of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, clearly remembers a particular patient who walked into his clinic. She was only 16 years old, but had chosen to freeze her eggs before undergoing fertility-threatening treatment for severe sickle cell disease. Her condition had left her blood vessels with extensive scarring, which made the frequent blood draws required for fertility preservation highly difficult.
That is, until May 2023, when Columbia Fertility began offering patients the option to use YourBio Health's TAP device, a needle-free blood collection system. TAP sticks to the upper arm, then uses a vacuum and eyelash-thin microneedles to coax blood from the capillaries. It's so simple and pain-free, Williams said, that patients can use the device at home and then send in their sample via Uber. (Williams was not involved in developing the TAP device, but is now part of the company's medical advisory board.)
For Williams' young patient with sickle cell disease, the difference was transformative. "She went from one of the most difficult blood draws you can imagine and became by far the easiest," Williams told Business Insider.
She isn't alone. Other patients have cried "tears of joy" after switching to TAP, Williams said, since many find repeated blood draws to be one of the most unpleasant parts of fertility treatment.
That feeling isn't limited to reproductive healthcare. Needles are among the most common, yet most reviled, tools used throughout the medical system. Up to 66 million US adults — roughly a quarter of the 18+ population — have some degree of needle phobia, studies suggest.
Some squeamish patients suffer through blood draws with closed eyes and sweaty palms, but research suggests others avoid common procedures like diagnostic tests and vaccinations altogether. "People delay tests all the time because of the time it takes out of their day, because of the hassle factor, because of the fear of needles, all of that combined," said Ben Casavant, the CEO and cofounder of Tasso, another company that makes needle-free blood collection devices.
Companies like Tasso aim to shift blood testing from anxiety-producing to "patient-friendly and painless," Casavant told Business Insider. When the patient experience improves, he added, people are more likely to get the tests and procedures they need, boosting their overall health.
How needle-free blood tests work
During a typical blood test, a phlebotomist inserts a needle into a vein in the arm, then extracts one or more tubes of blood.
There are now multiple devices on the market that disrupt that process. Some are used for inpatient care — such as BD's PIVO device, which extracts blood through IV catheters that have already been placed, rather than repeatedly sticking patients during hospital stays.
Fingerstick tests are another alternative to traditional blood draws. These tests generally involve piercing a fingertip with a lancet to produce a small amount of blood. While a lancet can be considered a tiny needle, it does not penetrate as deeply as a regular needle, which generally makes the process faster and less painful.
Some products use a similar technique to pull blood from the delicate capillaries in the upper arm. Tasso devices, for example, stick to the arm using an adhesive. When the user presses a button on the device, a vacuum forms and a lancet — hidden out of sight — pricks the skin. Then, the vacuum pulls blood from the capillaries and into a tube attached to the device.
The whole process feels "phenomenally different" than a typical blood draw and is so simple that users can even collect their samples at home, then mail them off to a laboratory, Casavant said. In studies, Tasso devices have shown both high accuracy and high patient satisfaction scores.
The TAP device also takes blood from capillaries in the upper arm, but uses microneedles rather than a lancet. Williams' team decided to use it at Columbia Fertility because they felt it was the least painful needle-free system available, he said.
The limitations of needle-free blood draws for medical testing
But there was still a potential problem: Compared to a classic blood draw, needle-free systems like TAP generate far less blood per sample. That's good for patient comfort, Williams said, but tricky from an operational perspective, since tests are typically run using a larger volume of blood.
Determined to make it work, Williams and his team developed a new testing method that allows them to use these smaller samples. In June, they published a small study demonstrating that the adjusted method generally mirrors the results of traditional blood tests. What's more, almost 75% of patients said they preferred the TAP method.
Still, needle-free systems "aren't ready for every test under the sun," said Dr. Charlene Bierl, the director of laboratory medicine at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine.
Clinicians can't just collect whatever type of sample they want and send it off to a lab, expecting accurate results no matter what. Labs are used to working with blood samples much larger than those collected by needle-free devices and have designed (and even automated) their testing procedures accordingly, Bierl explained. An errant sample that doesn't fit into that standardized process wouldn't be analyzed correctly. (Switzerland-based Loop Medical is developing needle-free devices meant to produce larger samples and work with existing testing systems.)
There could even be subtle differences in blood taken from capillaries versus a vein, which could also throw off the accuracy of some tests, Bierl added. "You have to be aware of the variation," Bierl said, rather than assuming alternative collection methods can be used across the board.
The medical system has been fooled by too-good-to-be-true testing methods before. Case in point: the disgraced company Theranos, which falsely promised to accurately run tests using just a few drops of blood.
That doesn't mean needle-averse patients and their doctors should halt their searches for more convenient and tolerable ways of collecting blood, Bierl said; it just means that companies need to do their due diligence to prove that tests truly work and consider how they'll fit into existing systems.
"These advances are potentially wonderful. We love to see innovation," Bierl said of the medical community. "We just wanted to see it tested."
