A Hand-Held Point-of-Care Biosensor Device for Detection of Multiple Cancer and Cardiac Disease Biomarkers Using Interdigitated Capacitive Arrays

This paper presents a hand-held point-of-care device that incorporates a lab-on-a-chip module with interdigitated capacitive biosensors for label-free detection of multiple cancer and cardiovascular disease biomarkers. The developed prototype is comprised of a cartridge incorporating capacitive biodetection sensors, a sensitive capacitive readout electronics enclosed in a handheld unit, and data analysis software calculating the concentration of biomarkers using previously stored reference database. The capacitive biodetection sensors are made of interdigitated circular electrodes, which are preactivated with single (for detecting one biomarker) or multiple specific antibodies (for detecting multiple disease biomarkers). Detection principle of capacitive biosensor is based on measuring the level of capacitance change between interdigitated electrode pairs induced by the change in dielectric constant due to affinity-based electron exchange in between antibodies/antigens and electrodes. The more antibody-antigens binding occurs, the more capacitance change is measured due to the change in dielectric constant of the capacitance media. The device uses preactivated ready-to-use cartridges embedded with capacitive biosensors with shelf-life of three months under optimal conditions, and is capable of onsite diagnosis and can report the result in less than 30 min. The device is verified with real patient blood samples for six different disease biomarkers.