A cancer patient in a rural town may have to travel hundreds of miles to participate in a clinical trial. An immunocompromised transplant recipient may forgo routine immune monitoring to avoid exposure risks in a crowded clinic. These barriers have quietly shaped who is represented in clinical research, leaving many of the people who stand to benefit most, systematically underrepresented in the studies designed to help them.
Decentralized approaches to research offer a way to bring studies directly to patients where they live, improving both participation and retention in clinical trials. At-home blood collection has already proven useful for measuring antibodies, hormones, and other biomarkers, but an important question remains. Could it also be used to analyze live immune cells?
Many clinical studies routinely analyze immune cells as key readouts in vaccine trials, cancer immunotherapy studies, and research involving immunocompromised patients. Traditionally, these samples are collected through standard blood draws that require a clinic visit.
Researchers at the Fred Hutch/University of Washington/Seattle Children’s Cancer Consortium set out to investigate whether immune cells from blood collected at home and shipped through standard mail can survive the journey and still yield reliable data for remote immune analysis.
Their study used the Tasso+ device, an at-home blood collection tool. The process begins by disinfecting the upper arm and attaching the adhesive-backed device to the skin. With the press of a button, a lancet is activated and the device collects up to one milliliter of blood over the course of a few minutes. The sample is then sealed in a provided shipping envelope and mailed directly to researchers.
The Tasso+ device has previously been evaluated in a range of applications, including studies measuring SARS-CoV-2 antibodies and research examining how wildfire smoke exposure alters gene expression. The ability to collect samples during situations like pandemics and natural disasters highlight the practical advantages of decentralized sample collection.
The goal of this research was to determine whether immune cell analysis on blood collected through the device would differ from standard venous blood draws, whether immune cells would survive shipping conditions, and whether the composition of immune cell populations would remain stable during transport.
Lead author Andrew Konecny, a graduate research assistant in the Prlic lab, specializes in high-parameter flow cytometry, a technique that helps scientists study the immune system in remarkable detail. By using fluorescent labels to track different immune cell markers, researchers can simultaneously measure multiple cell types and identify their functional states from a single blood sample.
The team first compared blood collected through a standard venous blood draw with blood collected using the Tasso+ device. After processing both sample types using the same laboratory methods, they found that immune cell populations and their characteristics closely matched between the two collection approaches.
They then turned to the larger challenge of shipping. To test a practical and inexpensive approach, the team intentionally avoided specialized packaging or preservation solutions. Samples were collected in tubes coated with an anticoagulant and shipped at ambient temperature within 48 hours through standard USPS mail.
The results were encouraging. T cells, a critical class of immune cells involved in fighting infections and responding to vaccines and cancer therapies, remained remarkably stable during shipping. As senior author Dr. Martin Prlic, explained, “Initially we didn’t know if anything would come back and still be alive, but they survived and maintained a phenotype similar to a standard blood draw or unshipped sample”. Their abundance, subtype distribution, and functional characteristics were largely preserved after transport. Not all immune cells performed equally well, however. Myeloid cells, another major category of immune cells, showed more substantial changes after shipping. The findings suggest that additional stabilizing reagents or preservation methods need to be developed to better protect these cells during transport without affecting downstream analysis.
The researchers also explored whether the approach could support long-term immune monitoring and found that it was possible to generate highly consistent flow cytometry data from these shipped samples over a period of roughly 18 months.
Taken together, these findings provide the first evidence that at-home blood collection devices could support remote monitoring of most live immune cells. Beyond convenience, the approach could help address one of the most persistent problems in clinical research - the exclusion of patients who are geographically distant, medically vulnerable, or otherwise unable to participate in clinic-centered studies. By reducing the need for frequent travel, decentralized research models could make clinical studies more inclusive and ultimately more representative of the populations medicine is intended to serve.
Fred Hutch/University of Washington/Seattle Children’s Cancer Consortium Members Drs. Michael Boeckh, Alpana Waghmare, and Martin Prlic contributed to this research.
The spotlighted research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Konecny AJ, Lim FY, Domenjo-Vila E, Lovas E, Blazevic RL, Kimball LE, Boeckh M, Waghmare A, and Prlic M. 2026. An at-home blood collection device for remote immune monitoring by high-parameter flow cytometry. JCI Insight. DOI: 10.1172/jci.insight.201116.
Science Spotlight writer Thamiya Vasanthakumar is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Campbell Lab at Fred Hutch. As a structural biologist, she uses cryogenic electron microscopy (cryoEM) to visualize the molecular structures of receptors found on the surface of immune cells.