Hybrid Paper-Plastic Microchip for Flexible and High-Performance Point-of-Care Diagnostics

A low-cost and easy-to-fabricate microchip remains a key challenge for the development of true point-of-care (POC) diagnostics. Cellulose paper and plastic are thin, light, flexible, and abundant raw materials, which make them excellent substrates for mass production of POC devices. Herein, a hybrid paper-plastic microchip (PPMC) is developed, which can be used for both single and multiplexed detection of different targets, providing flexibility in the design and fabrication of the microchip. The developed PPMC with printed electronics is evaluated for sensitive and reliable detection of a broad range of targets, such as liver and colon cancer protein biomarkers, intact Zika virus, and human papillomavirus nucleic acid amplicons. The presented approach allows a highly specific detection of the tested targets with detection limits as low as 10² ng mL^-1 for protein biomarkers, 10³ particle per milliliter for virus particles, and 10² copies per microliter for a target nucleic acid. This approach can potentially be considered for the development of inexpensive and stable POC microchip diagnostics and is suitable for the detection of a wide range of microbial infections and cancer biomarkers.