Access to affordable and user-friendly biosensors is crucial for advancing global healthcare. While lateral flow immunoassays have been the primary solution for decades, their limited sensitivity and suboptimal sample utilization present challenges. This project represents a systematic progression towards developing economically viable biosensors with heightened sensitivity, covering a range of diseases from viral infections to cancer. By integrating nanoplasmonics to induce visually perceptible signals and harnessing the coffee ring effect for protein pre-concentration, we achieved a remarkable limit of detection of 10 pg/ml. This surpasses lateral flow assays by one to two orders of magnitude, while reducing the sample size by tenfold. Furthermore, our integration of machine learning algorithms establishes a fully automated pipeline for smartphone-based biosensing, enabling precise sample concentration determination.
Project currently funded by: Other