European Bioanalysis Forum continued plans to support liquid microsampling

Since early 2008, the European Bioanalysis Forum (EBF) has been actively engaged in the discussion regarding the use of dried blood spot (DBS) sampling and has gradually increased their involvement by providing science-based input to the developing dialog within industry on the subject. Our contribution was built on the experience of many experts in our community who came together with the aim of providing an answer to, or a broader perspective on, the bioanalytical challenges of DBS.

The commitment of the EBF community to supporting the development of DBS was illustrated by the formation of an EBF DBS Consortium, in which we shared bioanalytical experience and agreed to perform focused DBS experiments. Furthermore, the Consortium connected different stakeholders in bioanalysis as well as in other expertise areas impacted by this technology, such as pharmacokinetics (PK) and toxicokinetics (TK) [1]. The results of the discussions and experiments performed by the Consortium were shared with industry at conferences, workshops and via publications [2–6]. This has added to the many individual contributions from the broader scientific peer community [7–9] and other industry consortia. In addition, in order to share our thoughts on a more effective strategy for the development and acceptance of the technology in those areas where it can provide immediate added value, we tried to provide context to the real or perceived hurdles for DBS and shared our vision on how this technology would fit into a wider implementation of microsampling [10,11]. One element of this vision was to ensure that the hurdles of DBS would not be inadvertently generalized and applied to other areas of microsampling. To emphasize the latter, one of our recommendations was to highlight DBS as ‘one of the approaches’ for microsampling, rather than ‘the approach’. Consequently, the EBF-DBS Consortium was rebranded to reflect this commitment and continued as the ‘EBF DBS-Microsampling Consortium’. After the recent publication of our updated recommendations [3], we refocused our efforts away from DBS sampling, although the Consortium offered to continue as a pivot point if needed, and regrouped around the opportunities for liquid microsampling (LMS) approaches. To reflect this, the name of the Consortium was rebranded to the current EBF Liquid Microsampling Consortium (EBF LMS Consortium).

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