Whole blood, serum, and plasma all tested with one device—How does the RapidPcak system simplify sample pre-processing?
Publish Time: 2025-10-27
Time is of the essence in modern clinical diagnostics, especially in settings like primary care, emergency departments, community clinics, and doctors' offices. Doctors urgently need testing tools that guarantee both accuracy and rapid results. Traditional laboratory immunoassays, while accurate, often rely on complex sample pre-processing procedures: whole blood must be centrifuged to separate serum or plasma. This is tedious, time-consuming, and requires both specialized equipment and specialized personnel. The RapidPcak system, a point-of-care testing (POCT) platform that integrates the advantages of thin-film microfluidics and chemiluminescence detection, successfully overcomes this bottleneck, enabling "one-device testing" of multiple sample types, including whole blood, serum, and plasma. This significantly simplifies sample pre-processing, truly achieving "sample-as-test," and speeding up and increasing the efficiency of clinical diagnostics.
1. Pain points of traditional sample processing: time-consuming, consumable, and equipment-dependent
In conventional immunoassays, whole blood samples must be centrifuged to remove red blood cells and obtain serum or plasma before testing. This process requires specialized equipment and consumables, such as centrifuges, pipettes, and centrifuge tubes, as well as specialized technicians. The entire process typically takes 15-30 minutes or even longer. This pre-treatment approach is impractical in primary healthcare facilities or field clinics with limited space and insufficient equipment, severely hindering the timeliness and accessibility of testing. Furthermore, the multiple manual operations increase the risk of sample contamination, cross-infection, and human error.
2. RapidPcak System's Innovative Breakthrough: Direct Detection without Centrifugation
One of the core advantages of the RapidPcak system is its ability to directly test whole blood samples without the need for centrifugation. This is achieved through its advanced thin-film microfluidics technology and intelligent reagent design. The test card incorporates a multi-layer microstructured membrane, enabling automated separation. Once the whole blood sample is added, the filter layer within the microfluidic channel effectively blocks visible elements such as red blood cells and white blood cells, allowing only plasma to pass through, creating an "in vivo centrifugation" effect. The target analyte then flows in a directed manner due to capillary action, binding to the pre-applied labeled antibody and ultimately completing the chemiluminescent reaction in the detection zone. The entire process is automated; users simply "add sample—wait for reaction—read results," significantly lowering the operational barrier to entry.
3. Multi-Sample Compatibility: Flexible Response to Diverse Clinical Needs
In addition to whole blood, the RapidPcak system also supports direct testing of serum and plasma samples. This means that fingerstick blood, venous whole blood collected on-site, and serum samples transferred from a central laboratory can all be analyzed on the same platform without changing equipment or adjusting procedures.
4. Closed-Circuit Design: Ensuring Safety and Accuracy
The RapidPcak system utilizes disposable, closed test cards. This process, from sample addition to reaction, is sealed throughout the entire process, eliminating aerosol contamination and biological exposure risks associated with open-circuit testing. Furthermore, each test card includes a built-in standard calibration curve, allowing the instrument to automatically identify the sample and perform quantitative analysis, eliminating human interpretation errors and ensuring accurate and reproducible results. The system also stores test records and supports data export for easy traceability and management.
5. Improving Efficiency and Empowering Primary Care
By streamlining sample pre-processing, the RapidPcak system significantly shortens the overall "sample in - result out" turnaround time, typically providing quantitative results comparable to those in central laboratories within 15 minutes. This not only accelerates clinical decision-making and improves diagnosis and treatment efficiency, but also enables more remote and resource-limited medical institutions to perform high-quality immunoassays, promoting the widespread use of high-quality medical resources.
With its "one-box" design for testing whole blood, serum, and plasma, the RapidPcak system revolutionizes the traditional reliance on sample pre-processing for point-of-care (POCT). It replaces cumbersome procedures with innovative technology and complex equipment with intelligent microfluidics, truly making testing simpler. In the modern healthcare landscape, which demands precision, speed, and convenience, the RapidPcak system represents not only a technological advancement but also a revolution in healthcare delivery, setting a new benchmark for point-of-care diagnostics.
