Laser-printable point-of-care sensors for low-cost medical diagnosis and disease monitoring

我们在这里提出的研究是开发激光打印的基于纸张的传感器，它将满足坚固、廉价、用户友好、一次性、易于交付给那些需要获得即时诊断的患者和公众的标准。这种传感器将在医疗保健和个性化医疗领域找到现成的市场，并且在发生流行病或更糟的情况下需要快速部署和测试时，将证明是无价的。这里的提议是第一个可行性试验，以确认我们确实可以打印可行的生物材料，用于检测选定的乳腺癌生物标志物。我们的IfLS/FOM团队已经鉴定并验证了这些标记物，并用于研究接受化疗的患者的反应。这将代表UoS开发的原始诊断产品。这项工作不仅涉及基于激光的打印，并评估打印后生物材料的可行性，而且还研究了用于传感器的纸基板的加工和加工技术。这种激光打印方法有许多优点，特别适用于生物医学材料的非接触输送，即：通过简单改变激光参数进行灵活的加工（图像化和沉积）。非接触处理（图案和印刷），这是至关重要的，当处理生物制剂。不需要专门的环境，从而消除了不必要的处理成本。激光打印的固有速度：目前的激光打印机每秒可以打印很多张纸，这是一个直接的类比。低生产成本，因为可以以卷对卷的规模批量生产设备。高特征分辨率允许创建紧凑的设备。（我们在未来后续提案中的最终目标是将生物材料以条形码的形式打印出来，通过智能手机应用程序进行智能/主动诊断读出）。与目前基于液体的输送（打印）方法相比，这种激光打印需要更小的试剂/分析物体积。

The research we are proposing here is to develop laser-printed paper-based sensors that will satisfy the criteria of being robust, inexpensive, user-friendly, disposable, and easy to deliver to those patients and members of the public who need to access point-of-care diagnosis. Such sensors would find a ready market within the healthcare and personalised medicine areas, and would prove invaluable when rapid deployment and testing is required in the case of epidemics or worse still, pandemics. The proposal here is a first feasibility trial to confirm that we can indeed print viable biological material, for application in detection of selected breast-cancer biomarkers. The markers have been identified and validated by our IfLS/FOM team and are used to study the response of patients receiving chemotherapy. This would represent an original diagnostic product developed at the UoS. The work not only involves laser-based printing, and evaluating post-printing the viability of the printed biomaterial, but also investigating techniques for machining and processing of the paper substrate to be used for the sensor. There are many advantage of this laser-printing approach that are uniquely appropriate for non-contact delivery of biomedical materials, namely:Flexible processing (patterning and deposition) by simple changes to laser parameters.Non-contact processing (patterning and printing) which is vital when dealing with biological agents.No need for a specialist environment thereby eliminating unwarranted processing costs.The inherent speed of laser printing: a direct analogy can be drawn from current laser printers which can print many sheets per second.low production costs because of the possibility to mass-produce devices on a roll-to-roll scale.High feature resolution allowing the creation of compact devices. (Our final goal in a future follow-up proposal will be to print biomaterials in the form of bar-codes for intelligent/active diagnostics readout via smart phone applications).This laser-printing requires much smaller reagent/analyte volumes compared to current liquid based delivery (printing) methods.