Electrochemical Sensor Platform for Fast, Sensitive Detection of Biomarkers in Whole Blood
Written by AZoSensorsFeb 15 2021
Many life-threatening medical conditions, such as sepsis, which is triggered by blood-borne pathogens, cannot be detected accurately and quickly enough to initiate the right course of treatment.
In patients that have been infected by an unknown pathogen and progress to overt sepsis, every additional hour that an effective antibiotic cannot be administered significantly increases the mortality rate, so time is of utmost essence.
The challenge with rapidly diagnosing sepsis stems from the fact that measuring only one biomarker often does not allow a clear-cut diagnosis. Engineers have struggled for decades to simultaneously quantify multiple biomarkers in whole blood with high specificity and sensitivity for point-of-care (POC) diagnostic applications as this would avoid time-consuming and costly blood processing steps in which informative biomarker molecules could potentially be lost.