Complementary cost-effective electrochemical platforms for point-of-use biosensing.

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Materials Science

Background:

• The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for rapid, affordable point-of-use diagnostics.
• Electrochemical biosensors offer quantitative readout and high sensitivity but are limited by poor electrode quality.
• Previous low-cost gold leaf electrodes were effective but not scalable.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the performance of mass-produced gold electrodes manufactured using roll-to-roll (R2R) technology.
• To compare R2R gold electrodes with manually fabricated gold leaf electrodes for biosensing.
• To assess the potential of R2R electrodes for scalable commercialization of electrochemical biosensors.

Main Methods:

• Fabrication of gold electrodes using roll-to-roll manufacturing.
• Comparison of R2R gold electrodes with previously developed gold leaf electrodes.
• Evaluation of biosensing performance using DNase I and BtsI-v2 activity detection.

Main Results:

• Roll-to-roll manufactured gold electrodes are high quality and equivalent to gold leaf electrodes.
• R2R electrodes support biosensing applications with comparable performance.
• The study demonstrates the viability of mass-produced electrodes for point-of-use sensing.

Conclusions:

• Roll-to-roll manufacturing offers a scalable solution for producing high-quality electrodes for electrochemical biosensors.
• Complementary technologies enable flexibility between mass production and on-site fabrication for point-of-use sensing.
• This advancement facilitates the commercialization of sensitive and affordable diagnostic tools.