Low cost approach for point-of-care diagnostics

As the population in Europe and many other industrial countries ages, applications of biosensors in health care close to the patient, i.e. at the point-of-care, and especially biomolecular diagnostics, become increasingly attractive to improve the quality of life of the patients and reduce the financial load on health care systems. The need to develop rapid and reliable diagnostic sensors for healthcare applications is therefore apparent. To meet these new criteria, new volume-scale capable manufacturing techniques are required for production of sensitive and reliable biosensors. The research efforts to achieve wide employment of biosensors are mainly geared toward biochips relying on conventional detection techniques, such as electrochemical and fluorescence detection. The integration of biomolecular components, nanotechnology-based transducer systems and low-cost mass-manufactured polymer fluidic and optical microsystems is one of the key issues to reduce unit costs sufficiently for widespread and ubiquitous employment of biosensors. The overall market for biochips in medical diagnostics constitutes one of the fastest emerging technology markets in the health care sector, with annual growth rates predicted to be above 25%. This growth scenario, however, requires the availability of fast, cost effective, yet sensitive and label-free, diagnostic platforms and biomolecular multiparameter tests, which can be applied for diagnosis close to the patient. Recent developments of hot embossed microfluidics, has made it possible to fabricate functional components by roll-to-roll techniques. In this presentation, we show our current achievements for manufacturing low cost immunosensors for pointof- care and home care applications.