Electronic transducing chip platforms for biosensing applications

Growing demand for a range of portable, rapid and low cost biosensing devices for the detection of disease biomarkers, toxic chemicals/drugs and engineered nanomaterials are ever demanding. Biosensors can play a critical role especially in the early diagnosis of disease such as cardiovascular disease (CVD) without having to rely on hospital visits where expensive and time-consuming laboratory tests are recommended. Other major areas where biosensors are essential include chemical and biomedical industries. In order to address these applications, our research mainly focused on developing suitable electronic transducing platforms that enable label-free, sensitive and single/multianalyte detection. One such example successfully applied was detection of a panel of disease biomarkers such as CRP, TNFα, and IL6 to potentially determine the CVD risks. This approach can be potentially extended to developing hand-held devices for point-of-care applications. Another area we employed biosensors are for detecting toxic effects of engineered nanomaterials (NMs) that induce cellular toxicity using living whole-cells-on-chip as biorecognition elements. Here, we summarized our research work carried out in our laboratory on capacitive transducing chip platforms for biosensing applications.