Rapid agglutination of whole blood by antiserum and its integration in a blood pretreatment module with dual function

Abstract

Blood pretreatment for many clinical applications in most situations involves removing blood cells, and today mainly depends on centrifugation. Centrifugation, however, needs machinery which consumes power. In the point-of-care-testing area in particular, harvesting plasma or serum from undiluted whole blood has been both an important hurdle and target at the same time. We describe herein a rapid and integrated method for the separation of plasma from undiluted blood in dozens of seconds without any power supply. We generated polyclonal antibodies from mice which captures human blood cells to make cellular aggregates, resulting in agglutination in a few seconds. The generated anti-human blood antiserum accelerated the sedimentation of blood cells, which was four times faster than the natural sedimentation, even from undiluted whole blood. Additionally, a plasma albumin reduction module was combined to make a pretreatment module having dual functions. The volume of recovered plasma increased with the decrease in albumin. The pretreatment of undiluted whole blood was finished in 30 s without any detectable blood cells using this dual function pretreatment module.