Label-free electrical immunoassay biosensors for early disease diagnosis
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This thesis focused on developing an inexpensive and user friendly “point- of- care” (POC) device for early disease diagnosis. Proteomics research has elucidated many new proteins as biomarkers that have the potential to greatly improve disease diagnosis. A combination of several biomarkers has been determined to provide the information necessary for robust diagnosis of a disease in any person within a population. This technology was employed in a clinical application to identify two disease states: (i) vulnerable coronary plaque rupture, which is the cause of acute coronary syndromes stroke; and (ii) neurodegenerative diseases, which are some of the leading causes of death and debilitation worldwide. In this thesis, nanomaterials were utilized to generate high surface-area-to-volume structures in developing a biosensor platform for early disease diagnosis. These devices are known as nanomonitors. The protein-specific capacitance measurement method was employed as the basis for protein biomarker detection in a preoperative state. Troponin T and alpha-synuclein were employed as the target protein biomarkers because they have been identified to be clinically relevant in identifying vulnerable coronary vascular plaque rupture and neurodegenerative disease states, respectively. The primary purpose of this thesis was to measure performance parameters such as limit of detection, specificity, dynamic range, and detection speed of nanomonitor devices for protein biomarker-based disease detection with accuracy greater than 95 percent.