Abstract

The integration of microfluidics with advanced biosensor technologies offers tremendous advantages such as smaller sample volume requirement and precise handling of samples and reagents, for developing affordable point-of-care testing methodologies that could be used in hospitals for monitoring patients. However, the success and popularity of point-of-care diagnosis lies with the generation of instantaneous and reliable results through in situ tests conducted in a painless, non-invasive manner. This work presents the development of a simple, hybrid integrated optical microfluidic biosensor for rapid detection of analytes in test samples. The proposed biosensor works on the principle of colorimetric optical absorption, wherein samples mixed with suitable chromogenic substrates induce a color change dependent upon the analyte concentration that could then be detected by the absorbance of light in its path length. This optical detection scheme has been hybrid integrated with an acoustofluidic micromixing unit to enable uniform mixing of fluids within the device. As a proof-of-concept, we have demonstrated the real-time application of our biosensor format for the detection of potassium in whole saliva samples. The results show that our lab-on-a-chip technology could provide a useful strategy in biomedical diagnoses for rapid analyte detection towards clinical point-of-care testing applications.

Highlights

  • Point-of-care diagnostics (POCD) for health monitoring involves the evaluation of indices from human health through tests performed outside of the clinical laboratory, typically right at the site of patient care [1,2,3,4]

  • We present the development of a simple, hybrid integrated optical microfluidic biosensor for rapid analysis of saliva, and we have demonstrated the application of the proposed biosensor format by detecting the presence of potassium from whole, untreated salivary samples

  • Minor delamination of the SU8 was observed along the walls of the poly dimethylsiloxane (PDMS) in some sections, SU8 was able to guide the input light efficiently under the PDMS clad

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Summary

Introduction

Point-of-care diagnostics (POCD) for health monitoring involves the evaluation of indices from human health through tests performed outside of the clinical laboratory, typically right at the site of patient care [1,2,3,4]. One of the main limitations of POCD is the requirement of unprocessed test samples drawn from patients to provide the desired sensitivity and specificity for conducting reliable assays in situ. Most of the currently validated clinical assays are carried out using plasma, prepared from whole blood samples inside sufficiently equipped laboratory conditions. We develop a biosensor platform that could be reliably used for instantaneous detection of target molecules from non-invasively obtained bodily fluid samples for real-time point-of-care testing applications.

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