Detection of human immunodeficiency virus on a photonic crystal-based platform

Abstract

The detection of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) at the point of care (POC) remains one of the most valuable advances in the healthcare. To enrich and broaden POC technologies for viral diagnosis, several technologies have been developed for virus detection utilizing electrical, optical, and acoustic sensing methods such as surface plasmon resonance (SPR), localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR), quartz crystal microbalance (QCM), nanowires and impedance analysis. Among these approaches, photonic crystal biosensors offer a rapid and sensitive optical detection method for biomolecules, cells, and viruses by monitoring the dielectric permittivity changes at the interface of a transducer substrate and the analyte. Photonic crystals (PCs) are macroporous materials that possess a periodically modulated dielectric constant, with the properties of confining and controlling the propagation of light owing to the existence of photonic band gap, a band of frequencies in which light propagation in the photonic crystal is forbidden. The capabilities of photonic crystals have a potential to meet the growing demand of simplified and improved point of care HIV diagnostics tools without compromising quality of patient care. This work focuses on examining the biosensing capabilities of a photonic crystal-based platform that can capture HIV in the presence of HIV antibodies. The preliminary data revealed that HIV was detected on the photonic crystal-based platform. These findings demonstrate that photonic-crystal based technologies are eligible devices to be used for point of care detection of viral infections. Further work is still required to determine its specificity as well as its capabilities for quantitative analysis, where it can be used for viral load measurements.