A disposable microfluidic-integrated hand-held plasmonic platform for protein detection

• Published in: Applied materials today Vol. 18; p. 100478
• Main Authors: Inci, Fatih, Saylan, Yeşeren, Kojouri, Amideddin Mataji, Ogut, Mehmet Giray, Denizli, Adil, Demirci, Utkan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01-03-2020
• Subjects: Hemoglobin; Microfluidics; Plasmonic sensors; Point-of-care; Portable biosensors; Portable biosensors; Hemoglobin; Point-of-care; Microfluidics; Plasmonic sensors
• DOI: 10.1016/j.apmt.2019.100478
• EISSN: 2352-9415
• ISSN: 2352-9407

We present a hand-held biosensing platform that provides label-free protein detection within a short assay time using inexpensive, disposable microfluidic-integrated plasmonic chips, potentially accelerating the deployment of portable biosensing systems for the point-of-care and primary care settings.
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•Healthcare is transiting from centralized care to point of care (POC) settings.•Portable diagnostic platforms have crucial impact on this paradigm shift.•This work shows a portable, low-cost tool to detect hemoglobin (Hb) from plasma.•It detects Hb within the cut-off of hemolytic process and sickle cell disease.•It provides a rapid assay (15–30 min) and requires minimum user involvement.
Healthcare is in the midst of a transformative shift from centralized care to point-of-care (POC). In this regard, recent efforts have focused on integration of biosensing technologies with clinical management and existing healthcare systems to improve the effectiveness and quality of care. Plasmonic technologies in particular, have been used for multiple applications in biosensing, pharmaceutical industry, food quality monitoring, and healthcare. However, bulky-sized platforms, expensive instrumentation, incomprehensive benchmarking, laborious protocols, and time-consuming processing steps remain challenges to adopt biosensing platforms to the POC settings. Here, we present a hand-held biosensing platform that integrates a plasmonic detection modality with a microfluidic chip. As a biological target model, we assess hemoglobin—an iron carrying protein in red blood cells. We comprehensively perform theoretical simulations and kinetic calculations to benchmark the platform performance. Overall, this miniaturized platform provides label-free detection, simple configuration for user-interface, facile sampling, assay-time down to 15–30 min, and inexpensive disposable chips. Therefore, this platform will potentially accelerate the deployment of portable biosensing systems for the POC and primary care settings.