Lab-On-Chip Electrochemical Biosensor for Rheumatoid Arthritis

Abstract

With the current prevalence rate of 0.5–1%, rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is the most common type of autoimmune arthritis. The chances of occurrence of this chronic multifactorial disease are more in females than males, significantly increasing with age (Crowson et al. in Arthritis Rheum 63:633–639, 2011;Eriksson et al. in Arthritis Care Res (Hoboken) 65:870–878, 2013; Smolen JS, Aletaha D, Barton A, et al. (2018) Rheumatoid arthritis. Nature Reviews Disease Primers 2018 4:1 4:1–23. 10.1038/nrdp.2018.1;Vollenhoven in BMC Med 7, 2009;). Rheumatoid arthritis primarily affects the lining of the synovial joints and can cause progressive disability, premature death, and socioeconomic burdens. Currently, there is no cure for RA. Hence the treatment strategy aims to speed up diagnosis and rapidly achieve a low disease activity state (LDAS) (Guo Q, Wang Y, Xu D, et al. (2018) Rheumatoid arthritis: pathological mechanisms and modern pharmacologic therapies. Bone Research 2018 6:1 6:1–14. 10.1038/s41413-018–0016-9). Presently, even though different techniques like ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay), radioimmunoassay, fluorescence-based analysis, surface-enhanced Raman scattering, and chemiluminescence-based analysis are prevalent as reliable diagnostic tools for rheumatoid arthritis biomarker detection, they have their own shortcomings. The immediate need for rapid, accurate, cheap, and early diagnosis have urged scientists to develop new advanced technologies, of which biosensors are one of the most reliable platforms. This review discusses the clinical as well as pathophysiological features of rheumatoid arthritis along with the application of different electrochemical nanobiosensors for its rapid and early diagnosis.