The iSWAB Advantage

Collect – Release – Transport: All in a Single Tube

Mawi DNA Technologies has overcome the problems of low recovery, high bacterial content, sheared DNA, and excessive resampling costs common to most current non-invasive sample collection methods. The innovative design of the iSWAB^™ collection device allows the release of cells captured from any swab into a proprietary lysis and stabilizing buffer.

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iSWAB^™ has been designed to address low DNA recovery and quality.

iSWAB^™ has been designed to address the issues of low DNA recovery and quality, high bacterial DNA content, high cost, and processing issues that current noninvasive sample collection approaches suffer from. The innovative design of iSWAB allows for the removal of the cells captured by the swab and then release into a proprietary mammalian cell-specific lysis and nucleic acid stabilizing buffer. The combination of the mechanistic release of cells and proprietary lysis buffer allows for the collection of a high amount of cells in a concentrated manner from one or more swabs in a small amount of lysis buffer while yielding significantly lower bacterial contamination.

The iSWAB^™ collection system is designed to facilitate self or assisted swab-based sample collection and concentration from a single or multiple swabs into a single tube for room temperature transport and long term storage. In addition the iSWAB^™ collection system is optimized for both manual and common automated sample preparation liquid handling workstations without the need for additional accessories.

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Challenges that are present with other methods

The use of swabs (buccal, nasopharyngeal, wound, etc. ) for non-invasive sample collection is well established. However the current sample collection process using swabs either allows for the collection and transport of a single swab in a specialized transport medium or the sample is collected by using two swabs at the most and then transported in a mail envelope. This sample collection process not only compromises the integrity of the sample, but in many cases results in low sample output making it not ideal for downstream applications such as immune or genomics-based assays.

Specialized saliva collection is another non-invasive sample collection method that is starting to be a preferred method over buccal swab and traditional mouth wash collection methods. Even though saliva collection allows for high recovery of human genomic DNA, the cost of the saliva collection devices, length of collection time, collection compliance, processing (automation) and storage remain major obstacles towards further adoption of this method to challenge blood sample collection.

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