In parts of the world where traveling to a clinic for routine blood tests is a financial and logistical challenge, HIV patients increasingly have the option to collect and ship a drop of their blood in paper-based devices that absorb the sample and store it for analysis in far-away labs.
While this technology is helpful for tracking someone’s adherence to their drug regimen or monitoring disease progression, the most frequently used devices don’t control how much blood they collect, potentially leading to inaccurate readings of a person’s infection.
Understanding this limitation, Charlie Mace , an associate professor at Tufts University’s Department of Chemistry, postdoctoral scholar Giorgio Morbioli, and colleagues engineered a paper device with wax-printed patterns that create precise channels and…