Development of multifunctional nanomaterials for on-site biosensors

Demand, desire and need for effective and reliable on-site test systems is high in health care, food safety and environmental monitoring. Blood glucose, pregnancy, and Covid tests work well and are used by billions of people today. When it comes to diseases, analytes or applications that are more complicated though, e.g. those with only trace amounts of analyte present, on-site tests are not available because current technologies are simply not good enough or would be much too expensive for their intended purpose. 

Our research focuses on the development of multifunctional nanomaterials to enable new test concepts and to provide unique new characteristics that can be exploited in signal enhancement, sample preparation and detection platforms. For example, liposomes, nanofibers and 2D graphene are specifically designed with analytical performance in real world samples and mass producibility in mind. Examples will be discussed describing their unique properties, impact on biosensor performance with focus on the detection of pathogenic organisms, toxins and disease biomarkers such as hemolytic pathogens, asthma detection in breath and sweat analysis through wearable sensors. The optical and electrochemical platform technologies include as such paper-based, microfluidic and miniaturized (bio)sensors.