Biosensor Platforms for the Detection and Quantification of Cardiovascular Risk Markers

Yasar Gürbüz, Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey

Abstract: Chest-pain diagnostics is a matter of great importance in emergency rooms due to requirement of fast and cost effective diagnostics, especially important for Turkey because of high ratio of casualties. Hence, any contribution on helping diagnosis of Cardio Vascular Disease (CVD) will be of great importance to our society, and became our motivation for initiating this highly interdisciplinary research program, involving electronics, biology and chemistry programs in the Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences at Sabanci University.

Originally, protein assays were developed in the enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) format in microtiter plate format. Although ELISA has been the long standing standard for quantitative analysis, this technique suffers from relatively low throughput, due to lack of multiplexing ability and high reagent and sample consumption. Development of fast and sensitive methods for the quantification of proteins is of great importance because traditional immunoassay platforms have very limited multiplexing capability and high sample volume requirements. Antibody microarrays may be a very useful tool for the marker discovery and molecular diagnosis and defined as the immobilized antibody molecules onto a chemically modified solid support in an array format and used to quantify proteins in biological samples. An important feature of antibody microarrays is having an ability to measure multiple proteins in complex mixtures using a small amount of samples. Besides the low volume requirement and less antibody consumption that could be considered as an improvement relative to current ELISA based techniques, a relationship between analyzed proteins may be observed. This multiple analysis system can improve diagnostic tests by reducing false positive and false negative results relative to the tests based on single markers. We have identified 6-proteins for "label-free" detection in human blood/serum that are known to be CVD indicators and studied sensor platforms that are capable of multiple detection/quantification of these markers in laboratory and portable applications. Hence, we have chosen microarray platforms for multiple protein detection in the laboratory environment and micro-interdigitated electrodes, more favorable because of its compatibility with microelectronic fabrication/processes, monolithic-integration into electronics and also compatibility with array implementation for multiple-detection, and finally Quartz Crystal Microbalance (QCM) platform for portable / field applications.

In this talk, I will discuss each method and share our findings of this study. I will conclude the talk with highlights of other research thrusts, such as RF Integrated Circuits and Systems, RFMEMS, Analog/Mixed-Signal Integrated Circuits, that we have been working on in the area of Microelectronics at Sabanci University.

About the speaker: Yasar Gürbüz received the MSc degree in 1993 and the PhD degree in 1997 in electrical engineering from Vanderbilt University in the USA. He worked as a senior research associate at Vanderbilt between 1997 and 1999. His responsibilities included directing and performing research projects, teaching courses and advising graduate students in the areas of solid-state devices and sensors. From 1999 to 2000 he worked at Aselsan Inc. In 2000, he joined Sabanci University, Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor in 2002. His research areas include Integrated Circuits (RF, Analog and Mixed-Signal), Solid-State Devices and Sensors and Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS). He has more than 100 peer-reviewed journal and conference/proceeding papers in his area of research.

Presentation slides with audio