The emerging biosensing devices broadly extend our capability to measure and monitor the biomolecules in living organisms. Yet most commercially available detection platforms are either simplified for a handful of abundant molecules in vivo, e.g., glucose and electrolytes, or designed with time-consuming pretreatment procedures for targets with a lower concentration. There is an urgent quest to integrate the advancement of analytical chemistry and nanotechnology to solve the long-existing problems for bio detection.
In this talk, I will first present a novel electrochemical detection platform that consists of highly nanoporous electrode for ultrasensitive biomolecule detection. I will explore how electron transfer and ion transport are coupled in the nanostructures for the mass-limited samples.
Next, I will present a real-time sensing technology to measure molecules in live animals through nanoporous electrodes with surface-immobilized aptamers. This electrochemical-based aptamer biosensor can continuously read the target molecule’s concentration profile and reaction kinetics. As an example, I will show an implantable biomedical device based on this biosensing technology to collect tissue-based pharmacokinetics and measure the concentrations of the chemotherapy drug at multiple tumor sites in a rodent model. So far, the efficacy and safety of chemotherapy have been estimated based on blood samples. This technique demonstrates apparent differences in pharmacokinetics relative to blood circulation that could meaningfully affect treatment.
Last, I will introduce a recent work that tailors electrode surface charge to discriminate and quantify chemically similar drugs and their metabolites. Ideally, this strategy will revolutionize drug molecule tracking to elucidate the difference in metabolic pathways in living organisms. Overall, this talk depicts a generalized approach to access in vivo real-time biochemical information for future clinical applications.
Kaiyu Fu is an assistant professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Notre Dame. Previously, he obtained his Ph.D. degree in Analytical Chemistry from Notre Dame and then did postdoctoral training at the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Department of Radiology at Stanford. Kaiyu was one of the ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry Graduate Fellowship recipients. He is broadly interested in advancing electroanalytical methods, including fabricating micro/nanoscale electrodes for biomedical devices and applying biosensors and bioelectronics for point-of-care diagnostics and treatment.