Abstract

Bioanalytical surfaces for PoC applications

Thomas Brandstetter, Group Leader, University of Freiburg

Point of Care Diagnostics (PoCD) stands for rapid, simple analytical procedures realized with low-cost equipment. Additionally, PoCD is also defined as door opener for personalized medicine. So far, biomedical technologies have been developed on demand to the needs of the developed world's medical community. Consequently, the diagnostic systems have met the requirements of well-funded laboratories in highly regulated and quality-assessed environments. But nowadays the requirements have changed due to the need of cost reduction in medical care and the world´s people majority needs with at best access to poorly resourced health care facilities with almost no supporting clinical laboratory infrastructure [1]. From the microsystems engineering point of view low-cost devices for bioanalytical approaches have to be designed. One major aspect for is the implementation of all known bioanalytical reactions. As always the diagnostics requirements specificity, sensitivity, robustness and procedure simplicity have to be addressed. These parameters have to be combined with assay miniaturization, parallelization and multi parametric analysis. The bioanalytical surface plays a key role for these challenges. Therefore, we review here the state of the art of surface chemistry meeting bioanalytical approaches. This considers substrate materials, coatings, immobilization of all kind of biomolecules (DNA, RNA, proteins or polysaccharides) and device geometries in combination with the bioanalytical reaction. Here, we highlight PCR [2], isothermal reactions [3] and immunoassays [4].