I-Corps: Printed Bioelectronic Solutions for Food Allergens

I-Corps项目更广泛的影响/商业潜力是改善食品安全。具体地说，i-Corps项目旨在确定使用印刷浮栅晶体管(FGTS)的新型生物传感技术的客户基础。FGTS是一种平台技术，可以用于检测任何可以使用抗体或称为DNA适配子的特殊单链DNA序列捕获的分析物。最有可能的商业化方向是面筋检测。正在发展中的无麸质食品行业价值28亿美元/年。这些食物对患有乳糜泻的人至关重要，乳糜泻影响了1%的人口。FGT平台还可以适应其他过敏原、临床相关蛋白质，甚至微生物。因此，这项技术的不断进步和商业化对食品安全产生了更广泛的影响，并可能对生物医学和临床环境产生影响。i-Corps项目的动机是开发一种新的基于晶体管的传感策略，该策略结合了印刷电子和微流控技术。现有的基于晶体管的传感技术提出了一个材料科学的难题，其中晶体管材料需要具有突出的电子性能以及在生物传感环境中的稳定性。相比之下，这里正在开发的技术中的传感器电子设备通过侧门结构与流体环境分离。已发表的研究证实，这个平台可以检测DNA和蛋白质。因此，它是一个灵活的生物传感平台。该项目的研究重点是客户发现，以确定有前途的商业化方向。最初的客户发现将集中在食品安全行业，目的是确定面筋检测是否是进入这一市场的最佳切入点。随后的活动将扩大客户发现工作，以确定生物医学和临床领域的目标。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is an improvement in the safety of food products. In particular, this I-Corps project aims to identify a customer base for a novel biosensing technology using printed floating-gate transistors (FGTs). FGTs are a platform-technology that can be used to detect any analyte that can be captured using an antibody or a special sequence of single-stranded DNA, known as a DNA aptamer. The most likely direction for commercialization is gluten detection. The growing industry of gluten-free foods is valued at $2.8 billion/year. These foods are critical to people suffering from celiac disease, which affects 1% of the population. The FGT platform can also be adapted to other allergens, clinically relevant proteins, or even microorganisms. The continued advancement and commercialization of this technology thus has broader impacts in food safety, and potentially for biomedical and clinical environments.This I-Corps project is motivated by the development of a new transistor-based sensing strategy that combines printed electronic and microfluidic technologies. Existing transistor-based sensing technologies pose a difficult materials science problem, wherein the transistor material needs to have outstanding electronic properties as well as stability in the biosensing environment. In contrast, the sensor electronics in the technology under development here are decoupled from the fluidic environment through a side-gate architecture. Published research has established that this platform can detect DNA and proteins. It is thus a flexible platform for biosensing. The research in this project focuses on customer discovery to identify promising directions for commercialization. The initial customer discovery will focus on the food safety industry, with the aim of determining whether gluten detection is the optimal entry point to this market. Subsequent activities will broaden the customer discovery efforts to identify targets in the biomedical and clinical areas.