I-Corps: Label-free Optical Sensor for Diagnostics

这个I-Corps项目在医疗保健领域的广泛影响/商业潜力是巨大的。这项技术可以通过在早期阶段检测严重的医疗状况（如癌症）来提高生活质量和预期寿命。该技术还可以扩展到通过优化纳米光子传感器来检测给定的一组生物标志物，从而在护理点诊断各种各样的医疗情况（例如心血管疾病）。除了床旁诊断，以低成本检测多种血液生物标志物的可能性使预测健康和个性化医疗等变革性领域成为可能。广泛的潜在变革性应用和广泛的目标客户为该技术提供了引人注目的商业潜力。I-Corps项目的重点是开发一种变革性医疗诊断技术，用于血液生物标志物的即时检测，这些生物标志物在癌症等医疗状况的检测中起着至关重要的作用。目标诊断系统是低成本的光学生物芯片，其可以通过消除或减少对现有检测技术中昂贵且耗时的扩增步骤的需要来大幅降低测定成本。使用纳米光子技术检测不同的医学相关生物标志物，能够开发出超紧凑、高灵敏度和高度多路复用的传感器，这些传感器是包括癌症在内的多种医学诊断场景所迫切需要的。在合理的时间内以高灵敏度和特异性以低成本检测多种血液生物标志物的能力将通过在护理点提供诊断工具对医疗保健产生潜在的变革性影响。在各种纳米光子解决方案中，高度小型化的等离子体纳米结构的使用具有更高的灵敏度和更低的成本的优点。通过将这些纳米结构适当地设计成阵列，可以实现更高的灵敏度。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project in the area of healthcare is significant. The proposed technology can potentially improve the quality of life and life expectancy by allowing the detection of severe medical conditions (such as cancer) at the early stages. The technology can also be extended to diagnose a large variety of medical situations (such as cardiovascular diseases) at the point of care through optimization of the nanophotonic sensor for the detection of a given set of biomarkers. Beyond point-of-care diagnostics, the possibility of detecting multiple blood biomarkers at a low cost enables transformative fields such as predictive health and personalized medicine. The wide range of potential transformative applications and the extensive range of target customers give a compelling commercial potential to the proposed technology.This I-Corps project is focused on the development of a transformative medical diagnostic technology for the point-of-care detection of blood biomarkers that play a crucial role in detection of medical conditions such as cancer. The target diagnostic system is a low-cost optical bio-chip that can drastically decrease the assaying cost by eliminating or reducing the need for costly and time-consuming amplifications steps in the existing detection technologies. The use of nanophotonic technology for detection of different medically relevant biomarkers enables the development of ultra-compact highly sensitive, and highly multiplexed sensors that are urgently needed for multiple medical diagnostic scenarios, including cancer. The ability to detect multiple blood biomarkers in a reasonable time with high sensitivity and specificity at a low cost will have a potentially transformative impact on healthcare by bringing diagnostic tools at the point-of-care. Among various nanophotonic solutions, the use of highly miniaturized plasmonic nanostructures has the advantage of higher sensitivity and lower cost. By proper engineering of these nanostructures into an array, higher sensitivity can be achieved.