Plasmonic Glucose Sensing

Abstract

Diabetes results in long-term health disorders including cardiovascular disease and blindness. One of the major challengesin the management of diabetes is the monitoring of glucose concentrations. Yet after several decades of intense research,1–5 still no method is available for the continuous non-invasive monitoring of blood glucose, never mind a generic technologywhich could be applied across-the-board for glucose sensing in other physiological fluids. In fact the invasive nature ofglucose monitoring in blood, primarily undertaken by “finger pricking”, has further fueled the search for non-invasive technologies,6–12 which can potentially monitor physiological glucose in fluids such as urine and tears based on the boronic acid / glucose6–11 and glucose-binding protein / glucose12 interactions.