How microsampling is impacting pharmacokinetic and toxicokinetic studies: volumetric absorptive microsampling (VAMS)

Microsampling, using minute amounts of biological specimen, is uniquely suited for carrying out human and animal pharmacokinetic and toxicokinetic studies. Indeed, it provides important advantages over common blood-drawing procedures (e.g. increased analyte stability, simpler and cheaper storage and shipping, self-sampling possibility, reduced consumption of materials and animals) while also maintaining similar performance and result reliability. In the microsampling space, volumetric absorptive microsampling (VAMS) is currently considered one of the most important and widespread technologies, thanks to its volume accuracy capabilities, making it natively suitable for quantitative analysis. In this review, an exhaustive treatment of pharmacokinetic and toxicokinetic studies using VAMS is presented, as well as several examples of analytical methods prospectively enabling the employment of VAMS for the same purpose.