Push-button Phlebotomy

To pivot is to survive in high-technology startups. Android did not begin as software for mobile phones, but rather as an operating system for digital cameras. The original idea for Twitter was a directory of podcasts. And Seventh Sense Biosystems (7SBio) began around bioactive pigments that, when tattooed, were to change color to signal an alteration in body chemistry for health-monitoring applications. Along the way, the development got a little bloody, so to speak. The tattoo nanotechnology ended up hitting capillaries that bled and interfered with the color readout. So what did the company do? They threw out the diagnostic application and began to focus on a painless way to sample capillary blood.Cofounder and MIT professor Robert Langer had started another company focused on making blood draws less painful. That company (Sontra Medical, now Echo Therapeutics) had shown him “what a really important area this is.” 7SBio's Touch Activated Phlebotomy (TAP) is a sterile, single-use blood collection device designed for operation by a user with or without a health care professional.A challenge with designing a painless blood stick is that the skin has a lot of elasticity. This saves us from bleeding each time we bump into something, but makes pressing microneedles into the skin a challenge. TAP has addressed this through a design that deploys a thin needle at an …