Development of a fabric-based plasmonic sensor for point-of-care diagnostics

Abstract

Recently, the demand for new diagnostic techniques for detecting disease biomarkers at the patient point-of-care (POC) has increased. This project focuses on our recent progress towards a fabric-based plasmonic sensor which can be used in conjunction with surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy to detect target biomarkers in bodily fluids. Building off of our recent success in this area, we have been exploring a variety of different fabric materials for this purpose. This project focused on detecting 6-thiouric acid which has the potential to be an important urine biomarker for the action of 6-mercaptopurine (MP), an immunosuppressive drug. In addition, detection of levofloxacin (fluoroquinolone-antibiotic; widely used for the treatment of bacterial infections, guanine and 2-deoxyguanosine (models of 8-oxo-2-deoxyguanosine, a cancer biomarker) also were performed in this research. Detection of these urine biomarkers focused on the use of electrochemical surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (EC-SERS) as well as the fabric-based SERS substrate.