Giving blood with little pain

Oct. 15--When Dr. Stanley Kim discovered he was a diabetic, he thought the commercially available finger-pricking devices for blood/sugar testing hurt too much.

"It was not a pleasant feeling. I found it unacceptable," said the Upland-based internal medicine and hematology specialist.

Kim started to do research. He looked at the skin layers, looking at what the minimum depth would be to draw blood.

Kim, 55, felt that conventional lancet devices were too large and penetrated the skin more deeply than necessary.

He said he thought this contributed to unnecessary pain. So Kim set about to develop a smaller, thinner device -- one that would hurt less. He trimmed the lancet's needle length to 0.75 mm, down from about 3 mm long, which Kim said "could hit bone." He dropped the width to .15 mm, about half the thickness of most.

After rejecting the factory's first run, Kim learned that the .15 mm width was too fragile for mass production.

"The quality was not what I wanted," he said.

So he widened it to 0.18 mm and shortened the needle to 0.7 mm, which duplicated the pain-free results of the first model. The slight widening of the width allowed the finished product to be both sharp and straight.

Thus, the Tiniboy lancet was born. Kim uses what he calls a "pain-free" Tiniboy lancet for his own daily or sometimes twice daily blood/sugar level testing.

Starting this week he is offering them for sale to the

general public, through Tiniboy.com.

Even before the shipment arrived, Kim said he already had about 300 people ready to try the new product.

Kim said the lancets cost about $10 for 100. Lancets tend to range from $7 to $14 per pack, but Kim said Tiniboy is thinner than the others."My intent with doing this in the first place was not to make money, but to cut the pain, especially for children," said Kim, who has practiced medicine in Upland for 21 years.

While adults with Type 2 diabetes, like Kim, may need to prick themselves one to three times daily, the Type 1 diabetes, which children develop, could require 10 pricks per day to monitor sugar levels, Kim said.

Kim said he has filed a patent application for his Tiniboy lancets and is working to win Medicare approval. Kim said he is using a South Korean firm to manufacture the lancets, but would like to bring the manufacturing to the Inland Valley. With investors, Kim said he would like to set up manufacturing in one of the area's many vacant industrial buildings or have the work done on existing equipment, which may not be fully utilized due to the economic downturn.

As for his own diabetes case, Kim said that through diet and exercise he has brought his blood/sugar levels to normal.

jim.steinberg@inlandnewspapers.com

(909) 386-3855

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