18 - Direct glucose fuel cell towards a self-powered point-of-care nanobiosensor

Abstract

Scaling-up cancer control to achieve universal health coverage is essential to improve the outcomes and save lives worldwide. Early diagnosis is one of the most effective public health measures in cancer, and this has propelled novel biosensing approaches for cancer biomarkers' detection. To this end, and prompted by the rapid progress in nanotechnology and microengineering, self-powered and self-signaled biosensors based on fuel cells have attracted considerable attention, due to the obvious advantages of combining both areas of research into a single synergetic device. For a nonbiological fuel cell, the pioneer demonstration of the concept was done for a direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC). The innovative approach used the anode triple-phase boundary layer inside of the DMFC as the nanobiosensor transducer. Therefore, the anode was modified with a proper molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) grown on the surface of the catalytic metal nanoparticles (nanozymes). This way, taking advantage of the catalytic activity toward the oxidation of the fuel and enhancing the biorecognition process toward the protein biomarker. Therefore, extending this approach to a direct glucose fuel cell (DGFC), by using glucose as biofuel, holds great potential as a more sustainable mean to power such devices. Thus, this chapter summarizes and discusses the challenges for the early developments of converting a DGFC into an MIP-based electrochemical autonomous nanobiosensor. It is envisaged that this approach paves the way to provide innovative solutions for cancer biomarker screening in point of care, both in developed and in developing countries.