NANOELECTRONIC DEVICES FOR SENSITIVE DETECTION OF BIOMARKERS IN HEALTHCARE MONITORING

Abstract

In recent years, biosensors have seen an exponential rise of their applications in a number of fields including the field of health care monitoring, particularly in point-of-care diagnostics. With the contemporary rise of nanotechnology, these biosensors have experienced an ever-growing inclusion of nano scale electronic devices or nanoelectronic devices to exploit the plethora of advantages of nanoelectronics. The performances of these nanoelectronic devices, however, largely depend on the nanomaterials used. Especially, carbon-based nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and graphene have proven to be superior candidates compared to others because of their multitude of electronic and mechanical properties suitable for biosensing. In particular, graphene-based FET (GFET) that combines the favorable material properties of graphene as well as the device properties of field-effect transistor have demonstrated its potential in biosensing with high sensitivity and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Though GFETs have been applied for sensitive detection of a number of analytes, there are still areas for further development in a number of ways—application of the platform for sensing new biomarkers, developing an integrated microfluidics platform, etc. in order to improve the sensing performances as well as applicability in real-world setting. Therefore, in this seminar, I will discuss the current states and challenges of the GFET-based sensing and present my work to further advance this platform. Moreover, development of a flexible GFET biosensor compatible with wearable platform will also be discussed. To provide the biosensors with the required selectivity, DNA-based aptamers with specific affinity towards the target analyte are used. However, conventional techniques for functionalization of aptamers suffer from several challenges including low throughput, poor control, and long turnaround time. To address these challenges, I will present my efforts on the development of new strategies to address these challenges both on CNT and graphene-based platforms