Innovative Nanobiosensors for Infectious Disease Diagnosis

Abstract

Despite unprecedented scientific advancement, communicable diseases continue to cause more than 17 million deaths every year. Infections of the respiratory tract alone notoriously enjoy top ranks among the leading causes of death in every financial stratum of the society. These diseases can be prevented and managed efficiently by early and rapid diagnosis. The outbreak of COVID-19 has established the critical importance of high precision diagnosis of infectious disease on a large scale. Moreover, the clinical diagnosis is costly and time-consuming. This can hinder the pace of management decisions in case of epidemic and bioterrorism. In this regard, nanobiosensors show enormous potential as it can meet both pace and sensitivity requirements at relatively lesser resource input and smaller quantities of analytes. Nanobiosensors based point of care technology (POC) can play an important role in the early diagnosis of infectious disease and its management. In this chapter, we have briefly described the need of developing nanobiosensor based infectious disease diagnosis methods, different types of nanobiosensor, and their working principle. The chapter further describes the current advancement of nanomaterials-based sensors for viruses and bacteria detection, and concludes with the prospect of nanobiosensors in communicable disease management.