What if you could donate blood at home instead of at the doctor’s office? That’s the premise of Tasso, a Seattle-based startup that’s riding the wave of virtual healthcare.
        Tasso co-founder and CEO Ben Casavant told Forbes that the company recently raised $100 million led by healthcare investment manager RA Capital to develop its blood sampling technology. The new funding raised the total equity investment to $131 million. Casavant declined to discuss the valuation, although the venture capital database PitchBook valued it at $51 million in July 2020.
        “This is an incredible space that can be destroyed very quickly,” Casavant said. “$100 million speaks for itself.”
        The company’s blood collection kits—Tasso+ (for liquid blood), Tasso-M20 (for desiccated blood) and Tasso-SST (for preparing non-anticoagulated liquid blood samples)—work in a similar way. Patients simply stick the ping-pong ball-sized button device to their hand with a lightweight adhesive and press the device’s large red button, which creates a vacuum. The lancet in the device pierces the surface of the skin, and a vacuum draws blood from the capillaries into a sample cartridge at the bottom of the device.
        The device only collects capillary blood, the equivalent of a finger prick, and not venous blood, which can only be collected by a medical professional. According to the company, participants in clinical studies reported less pain when using the device compared to standard blood draws. The company hopes to receive FDA approval as a Class II medical device next year.
        “We can visit a doctor virtually, but when you have to come in and get basic diagnostic tests, the virtual veil breaks,” said Anurag Kondapally, head of RA Capital, who will join Tasso’s board of directors. better engage the health system and hopefully improve equity and outcomes.”
        Casawant, 34, holds a Ph.D. UW-Madison biomedical engineering major founded the company in 2012 with UW lab colleague Erwin Berthier, 38, who is the company’s CTO. In the laboratory of University of Washington at Madison professor David Beebe, they studied microfluidics, which deals with the behavior and control of very small amounts of fluid in a network of channels.
        In the lab, they started thinking about all the new technologies that the lab could do that require blood samples and how difficult it is to get them. Traveling to the clinic to donate blood to a phlebotomist or registered nurse is expensive and inconvenient, and finger pricking is cumbersome and unreliable. “Imagine a world where instead of jumping in a car and driving somewhere, a box appears at your door and you can send the results back to your electronic health record,” he said. “We said, ‘It would be great if we could make the device work.’
        “They came up with a technical solution and it was really smart. There are many other companies trying to do this, but they have not been able to come up with a technical solution.”
        Casavant and Berthier worked evenings and weekends to develop the device, first in Casavan’s living room and then in Berthier’s living room after Casavan’s roommate asked them to stay. In 2017, they ran the company through the healthcare-focused accelerator Techstars and received early funding in the form of a $2.9 million grant from the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). Its investors include Cedars-Sinai and Merck Global Innovation Fund, as well as venture capital firms Hambrecht Ducera, Foresite Capital and Vertical Venture Partners. Casavant believes he tested the product hundreds of times during its development. “I like to know the product thoroughly,” he said.
        When Jim Tananbaum, a physician and founder of $4 billion asset manager Foresite Capital, stumbled upon Casavant about three years ago, he said he was looking for a company that could perform phlebotomy anywhere. “This is a very difficult problem,” he said.
        The difficulty, he explained, is that when you draw blood through a capillary, the pressure ruptures the red blood cells, rendering them unusable. “They came up with a really smart technical solution,” he said. “There are many other companies trying to do this but have not been able to come up with a technical solution.”
        For many, blood-drawing products immediately bring to mind Theranos, which promised to test needle-stick blood before its crash in 2018. The disgraced 37-year-old founder Elizabeth Holmes is on trial for fraud and faces up to 20 years in prison if violated.
       Just press the big red button: the Tasso device allows patients to take blood at home, without any medical training.
        “It was fun to follow the story, as we were,” Casavant said. “With Tasso, we always focus on science. It’s all about diagnostic results, accuracy and precision.”
        Tasso’s blood collection products are currently being used in various clinical trials at Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Merck and at least six biopharmaceutical companies, he said. Last year, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center launched a Covid-19 study to study infection rates, timing of transmission, and potential re-infection using a Tasso blood draw device. “Many groups wishing to conduct trials during a pandemic need a better way to reach patients,” Casavant said.
        Tananbaum, who was on the Forbes Midas list this year, believes Tasso will eventually be able to scale to hundreds of millions of units a year as device costs drop and apps are added. “They start with the cases with the highest demand and the highest profits,” he said.
        Tasso plans to use the new funds to expand production. During the pandemic, it purchased a plant in Seattle that previously supplied boats to West Marine, allowing the company to shut down production at its offices. The space has a maximum capacity of 150,000 devices per month, or 1.8 million per year.
        “Given the volume of blood draws and blood tests in the US, we will need more space,” Casavant said. He estimates that there are about 1 billion blood draws each year in the United States, of which laboratories perform about 10 billion tests, many of which help treat chronic diseases in an aging population. “We are looking at the scale we need and how to build this business,” he said.
       RA Capital is one of the largest healthcare investors with $9.4 billion under management as of the end of October.