Abstract

Nanophotonic Lab on Chip Platforms for Ultra-sensitive Analysis at the Point-of-care

Laura Lechuga, Professor & Group Leader, Institut Català de Nanociència i Nanotecnologia (ICN2) CSIC and CIBER-BBN

Modern healthcare is demanding novel diagnostic tools that could enable quick, accurate, reliable, and cost-effective results so that appropriate treatments can be implemented in time, leading to improved clinical outcome. Such hand-held point-of-care (POC) devices, able to deliver an instant diagnostics of our health status at home, at doctor's office, at bed side or at resource-limited settings, could become a reality soon thanks to the last advances in nanobiosensors, lab-on-a-chip, wireless and smart-phone technologies which promise to surpass the existing challenges, opening the door to a global health access. The driving force of our research is to achieve such ultrasensitive lab-on-a-chip platforms for POC label-free analysis using nanophotonic technologies and custom-designed biofunctionalization protocols, accomplishing the requirements of disposability and portability. We are using innovative designs of nanophotonic biosensors based on plasmonic nanostructures or silicon photonics technology (heteromodal nanointerferometers) and full microfluidics lab-on-chip integration [1,2]. Noticiable, we have demonstrated the suitability of our photonic nanobiosensors for the clinical diagnostics, with extremely sensitivity and selectivity and directly using untreated human samples, as for the evaluation of allergy reactions in blood serum, the detection of infectious microorganisms (at few cfu/mL) in human ascetic fluids, the early detection of colorectal cancer though the presence of autoantibodies in patients serum or the detection of microRNA biomarkers related to cancer progression in urine or serum, among others.