Abstract

Cost-Efficient Optical-Electrical Nanobiosensors for Pandemics and More

Arben Merkoçi, ICREA Professor And Group Leader, Catalan Institute of Nanoscience And Nanotechnology

Health care system worldwide is facing several challenges. Aging of the population, chronic disease, spending on health and pandemics request a novel generation of diagnostics platforms. While conventional labs and their clinical analysis instruments are quite important given their sensitivity, information capability including their suitability for suitability for basic research they still suffer from issues such as their high costs, being time consuming, requesting sophisticated equipment, trained users, certain facilities etc. Point of care devices (POC) are a great alternative to face overall urgent needs but also for our everyday health care. The development of POCs is one of the most important R&D in the area of health diagnostics. There is a high demand to develop innovative and cost effective devices with interest for health care. These devices should be REASSURED: Real-time connectivity, Ease of specimen collection, Affordable, Sensitive, Specific, User-friendly, Rapid, Robust, Equipment-free, Delivered to those who need it. The development of such devices is strongly related to new materials and technologies being nanomaterials and nanotechnology of special role. How to design simple plastic/paper-based biosensor architectures including wearables through printing or stamping? How to tune their analytical performance upon demand? How one can couple nanomaterials with paper/plastics and what is the benefit?   Which are the perspectives to link these simple platforms and detection technologies with mobile communication? I will try to give responses to these questions through various interesting with extreme interest for clinical emergency applications related to virus and other important biomarkers. These devices and corresponding technologies are related to ubiquitous methods that would be quite important for POC diagnostics related to pandemics and more.