Carbon nanostructured multipanel sensor for human health monitoring

Thursday, 10 July 2014 at 16:15 in INF 328

Irene Taurino, Integrated Systems Laboratory, EPFL

 

Abstract:

A rapid monitoring of a set of metabolites (e.g. glucose, lactate) in human fluids is of significant importance in medicine. Theoretically, instrumentation designed for a timely multi-sensing should be able to do several measurements from a small volume and undiluted sample. Consequently, the development of a tiny device is a crucial requirement. Electrochemical miniaturized devices are particularly advantageous because of the inexpensive and reproducible fabrication procedures and the simple analytical measurements. A continuing challenge in their fabrication is the detection of biomolecules in the physio-pathological concentration range. To this end, carbon nanomaterials are considered due to their high electrocatalytic activity, large surface area and good support for enzyme immobilization. 

 

Multisite electrochemical sensor incorporating microelectrodes modified with CVD grown carbon nanomaterials

 

In order to implement a full parallel process, the integration of carbon nanomaterials on microsurfaces should be compatible with the low-cost CMOS technology. Conversely, conventional nanostructuration approaches are time-consuming, expensive, and hardly reproducible and require additives (e.g. polymers) that mask the nanomaterial promising properties and compromise the time-stability of the device due to the binder-matrix instability in aqueous environments. We considered the selective CVD growth of carbon nanomaterials as one of the most promising method to enable a close coupling nanomaterial-electrode. A CVD system normally works at temperatures too high (600 - 750 ^oC) to be compatible with CMOS processes. In the present talk, I will describe a versatile protocol to integrate a wide range of carbon nanomaterials onto an array of Pt microelectrodes of a device by a CVD process down to 450 ^oC. The nanostructured sensor exhibits excellent sensing parameters by both direct detection of electroactive metabolites and sensing mediated by an enzyme.

About the speaker:

Irene Taurino was born in Leverano, Italy in 1986. She received the B.Sc. and the M.Sc. degree in Biomedical Engineering both cum laude from Politecnico di Torino (Italy) in 2008 and 2010, respectively. She also got the M.Sc. degree in Biomedical Engineering from Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in 2010. She carried out her Master thesis at EPFL in collaboration with Politecnico di Torino working on carbon nanotube-based biosensors. Currently she is doctoral assistant in the Integrated System Laboratory (LSI) under the supervision of Sandro Carrara and Giovanni De Micheli.