Complementary Cost-Effective Electrochemical Platforms for Point-Of-Use Biosensing

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated the urgent need for rapid and affordable point-of-use diagnostics. Electrochemical biosensors are useful for such applications because they enable quantitative readout and show drastically improved sensitivity compared to prevalent lateral flow technologies. However, to-date, the poor quality of commercially-available, mass-produced electrodes has prohibited the scaled production and commercialization of such biosensors beyond glucose sensing. Low-cost gold leaf electrodes have previously been developed that can be fabricated with no specialized equipment at the point-of-use. These electrodes are more effective for biosensing than prevalent commercially-available systems. Yet, their manual fabrication can be tedious and is not scalable in its current form. Here, performance of mass-produced gold electrodes generated using roll-to-roll manufacturing is evaluated, offering the potential to scale production. Upon comparison of these electrodes with the gold leaf, it is found that these electrodes are high quality, equivalent to the gold leaf electrodes, and support biosensing applications through the detection of both DNase I and BtsI-v2 activity with comparable performance. These results demonstrate the role of complementary technologies to achieve point-of-use sensing by enabling flexibility between mass-produced manufacture and on-site production.