silicon and Communicable-Diseases

Over the past decade, silicon nanowire (SiNW) biosensors have been studied for the detection of biological molecules as highly sensitive, label-free, and electrical tools. Herein we present a comprehensive review about the fabrication of SiNW biosensors and their applications in disease diagnostics. We discuss the detection of important biomarkers related to diseases including cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and infectious diseases. SiNW biosensors hold great promise to realize point-of-care (POC) devices for disease diagnostics with potential for miniaturization and integration.

Topics: Biomarkers, Tumor; Biosensing Techniques; Cardiovascular Diseases; Communicable Diseases; Diagnostic Equipment; Humans; Influenza A Virus, H1N1 Subtype; MicroRNAs; Nanowires; Neoplasms; Silicon; Troponin T

There is an increasing awareness that health care must move from post-symptomatic treatment to presymptomatic intervention. An ideal system would allow regular inexpensive monitoring of health status using circulating antibodies to report on health fluctuations. Recently, we demonstrated that peptide microarrays can do this through antibody signatures (immunosignatures). Unfortunately, printed microarrays are not scalable. Here we demonstrate a platform based on fabricating microarrays (~10 M peptides per slide, 330,000 peptides per assay) on silicon wafers using equipment common to semiconductor manufacturing. The potential of these microarrays for comprehensive health monitoring is verified through the simultaneous detection and classification of six different infectious diseases and six different cancers. Besides diagnostics, these high-density peptide chips have numerous other applications both in health care and elsewhere.

Topics: Amino Acid Sequence; Antibodies, Monoclonal; Antibody Specificity; Communicable Diseases; Health Status; Humans; Lab-On-A-Chip Devices; Microtechnology; Molecular Sequence Data; Monitoring, Physiologic; Neoplasms; Peptides; Protein Array Analysis; Quality Control; Silicon

Topics: Blood; Communicable Diseases; Gastroscopy; Hepatitis; Hepatitis A; Humans; Iron; Liver Diseases; Silicon