I-Corps: Label-free Optical Sensor for Diagnostics

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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.