Plenary Speakers

Screening asymptomatic organisms (humans, animals, plants) with a high-diagnostic accuracy using point-of-care-testing (POCT) technologies, though still visionary holds great potential. Convenient surveillance requires easy-to-use, cost-effective, ultra-portable but highly reliable, in-vitro-diagnostic devices that are ready for use wherever they are needed. Currently, there are not yet such devices available on the market, but there are a couple more promising technologies developed at readiness-level 5: the Clustered-Regularly-Interspaced-Short-Palindromic-Repeats (CRISPR) lateral-flow-strip tests and the Single-Molecule-with-a-large-Transistor (SiMoT) bioelectronic palmar devices. 

To put disease-related biomarkers to work for personalized monitoring of health and disease, new high-performance technologies are needed to enable rapid and sensitive analysis of proteins and other biomarkers. Electrochemical methods providing low cost and direct biomarker readout have attracted a great deal of attention for this application. Recently we  developed reagentless sensors that are powerful detectors for in vivo protein sensing (Nature Chemistry, 2021, J. am. Chem. Soc. 2023, Angew. Chem. Intl. Ed. 2023) as well as the analysis of viral particles in situ in the oral cavity (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2021). This talk will summarize the development of these sensors, their application to a variety of clinical problems, and the development of a range of implatable sensors for in vivo monitoring.