TUD

The next issue of Advanced Healthcare Materials will feature a cover image attributed to a full paper by members of our chair. The work by Daniil Karnaushenko, Bergoi Ibarlucea, Sanghun Lee, Gungun Lin, Larysa Baraban, Sebastian Pregl, Michael Melzer, Denys Makarov, Walter M. Weber, Thomas Mikolajick, Oliver G. Schmidt and Gianaurelio Cuniberti with the title "Light Weight and Flexible High-Performance Diagnostic Platform" will be published in the next issue of Adv. Health. Mat. and is already available online. Their suggested cover image (see above) has been accepted and will feature the next issue of the journal. Congrats!

The abstract reads as follows: A flexible diagnostic platform is realized and its performance is demonstrated for early detection of avian influenza virus (AIV) subtype H1N1 DNA sequences. The key component of the platform is high-performance biosensors based on high output currents and low power dissipation Si nanowire field effect transistors (SiNW-FETs) fabricated on flexible 100 micrometer thick polyimide foils. The devices on a polymeric support are about ten times lighter compared to their rigid counterparts on Si wafers and can be prepared on large areas. While the latter potentially allows reducing the fabrication costs per device, the former makes them cost efficient for high-volume delivery to medical institutions in, e.g., developing countries. The flexible devices withstand bending down to a 7.5 mm radius and do not degrade in performance even after 1000 consecutive bending cycles. In addition to these remarkable mechanical properties, on the analytic side, the diagnostic platform allows fast detection of specific DNA sequences of AIV subtype H1N1 with a limit of detection of 40E-12 M within 30 min suggesting its suitability for early stage disease diagnosis.

Link to the paper.

Press release:

Flexible Future of Point-of-Care Disease Diagnostic
cfaed scientists at Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research Dresden (IFW), TU Dresden, and Nanoelectronic Materials Laboratory (NaMLab gGmbH) realized flexible light weight diagnostic platform enabling its cost efficient high-volume delivery to medical institutions worldwide.
The world-wide deployment of biomedical devices for health monitoring, point-of-care diagnostics and environmental sensing is hampered by their high cost that is not readily affordable for e.g. developing countries. The primary task is therefore to reduce the price of the devices and allow for their high-volume delivery in a cost efficient manner, e.g. container transportation. For the latter, a crucial aspect is to reduce the weight of the device.
In the frame of the Silicon Nanowire Research Path (SiNW) of TU Dresden’s Cluster of Excellence Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed), we realized a light weight and mechanically flexible diagnostic platform based on cost-effective highly sensitive Si nanowire field effect transistors fabricated on flexible polymeric foils, which are only 100 µm thick. The devices reveal remarkable limit of detection for subtype H1N1 Avian Influenza Virus, which is considered as a global major risk for human health, exemplified by the declaration as pandemic to the 2009 swine-origin one. The devices on polymeric support are about 10 times lighter compared to their rigid counterparts realized on conventional Si wafers that make them cost efficient for high-volume delivery to medical institutions worldwide. We envision that the realization of the sensitive diagnostic platform will allow the timely diagnosis of the viral or infectious diseases also in the developing countries.
This work was carried out at the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research Dresden (IFW) in cooperation with the Chair of Materials Science and Nanotechnology of TU Dresden and NaMLab.

The original work was published as a cover story of the recent issue of Advanced Healthcare Materials 10, 1517 (2015).