Diagnosis of endogens
PI-SENS - Personalized Medicine enabled by Intelligent Sensing Systems
Detection of biomarkers in blood, sweat, urine, etc.
​
The focus of Area 2 is the development of innovative and efficient concepts for point-of-care sensing. Portable diagnostic approaches are part of this next generation of healthcare monitoring systems. This requires consideration of different technological concepts as well as the optimization of the sensor surface, the choice of appropriate transducer modes and working in biofluidic samples (saliva, sweat, breath etc) which can be easily collected by the patient itself.
AREA 2
![Different bindings of biomolecules inside and outside the electrical double layer. Only the changes inside the electrical double layer are detected. [λD, Debye length]. Modified from [41].](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/83eda4_6f0f99dc1652485aaf95b3410c17f1ae~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_451,h_287,al_c,lg_1,q_85,enc_auto/02_Diagnosis%20of%20Endogen_edited.png)
Different bindings of biomolecules inside and outside the electrical double layer. Only the changes inside the electrical double layer are detected. [λD, Debye length].
Modified from [41].
Indeed, sensing biomarkers in sweat, saliva and breath rather than blood is at the cutting edge of diagnostic and applicable for personalized point-of -care sensing. Saliva is a particular complex sensing medium as it is composed not only of water and salts, but a larger range of organic proteins (e.g.: amylase, peroxidase, lysozyme, cortisol etc.). The easy of saliva collection makes it however ideal for point-of care testing devices. The use of electrical transducer such as graphene-based field effect transistors (GFET) are ideally suited for this purpose and will one of the focal points of Area 2.
Exhaled breath condensate (EBC) sensing will be in addition focused here, as its “clean” aspect allows to overcome matrix-based surface fouling issues. Given that several diseases are transmitted via exhaled breath droplets, detection of breath-derived biomarkers is a promising diagnostic approach, currently not studied using classical biosensing concepts such as field effect transistors. Integration of wireless data collection and data management will bring these sensing systems to higher TRL levels with larger market access acceptability. Next to these approaches, the development of portable more classical diagnostic approaches should be included. Portable optical diagnostic tools will be considered in parallel to electrical transducers with the aim to add value to cancer diagnostics.