Development of Label-Free Triboelectric Nanosensor as a Drug Screening Platform

Abstract

Due to the emergence of new diseases, drug resistance and other factors, the discovery and development of new drugs has always been a very important issue in our life. However, discovering and developing new drug requires extensive pharmacological assessment, which is a complex, prolonged, highly expensive and risky process and takes about 10 to 15 years for the drug to be clinically approved. Recently, in order to improve the efficiency and accuracy of drug development, the researchers have been working on developing new drug screening platform. This research is dedicated to the development a label-free, rapid, easy operation and cost-efficient drug screening platform based on triboelectrification. Triboelectrification, also known as contact electrification, is the phenomenon which occurs when two interfaces come into contact and causes charge transfer between them. Recently, new technology with high development potential based on triboelectrification is called triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG), which can transfer mechanical energy into electrical energy. Moreover, TENG is developed as a self-powered sensor called as triboelectric nanosensor (TENS), which is coupling TENG and sensor. This work is the first drug screening platform of its kind based on triboelectrification. Recently, TENS have been developed for chemical sensing applications, in which the contact interface of TENG is functionalized with probe molecules with selectivity for different chemical analytes. After functionalization of the triboelectric contact layer, the rate of electron transfer induced by the triboelectric effect is different, result in the change in the electrical signal of TENG. When the contact interface is modified with target analyte, we observe a variation in the measured electrical output signal due to the amount of target on contact interface, thus demonstrating a self-power sensing process without any external power source. Here, we propose a new platform which when functionalized with protein, exhibits a variation in the electrical output signal with different concentration of drug. Furthermore, based on triboelectric effect, the as-prepared sensor was used to detect drug molecules with different binding affinities to the probe protein. The obtained results demonstrate a great potential for a highly sensitive drug screening platform.