Disease Detection with Molecular Biomarkers: From Chemistry of Body Fluids to Nature-Inspired Chemical Sensors

Abstract

This article aims to review nature-inspired chemical sensors for enabling fast, relatively inexpensive, and minimally (or non-) invasive diagnostics and follow-up of the health conditions. It can be achieved via monitoring of biomarkers and volatile biomarkers, that are excreted from one or combination of body fluids (breath, sweat, saliva, urine, seminal fluid, nipple aspirate fluid, tears, stool, blood, interstitial fluid, and cerebrospinal fluid). The first part of the review gives an updated compilation of the biomarkers linked with specific sickness and/or sampling origin. The other part of the review provides a didactic examination of the concepts and approaches related to the emerging chemistries, sensing materials, and transduction techniques used for biomarker-based medical evaluations. The strengths and pitfalls of each approach are discussed and criticized. Future perspective with relation to the information and communication era is presented and discussed.

Medical Micro/Nanorobots in Precision Medicine

“…Moreover, motile micro/nanorobots could be used to collect diverse biomarkers, such as exosomes [264][265][266] (small vesicles excreted from cells) and disease markers. [267,268]…”

Gas Sensors Based on Chemi-Resistive Hybrid Functional Nanomaterials

“…Controlling the fluidic behavior of gas [202], enhancing the anti-interferon ability by loading novel porous sieving materials (e.g., MOF, COF) [203][204][205][206], screening the crosstalk (such as deformation [207,208]) by special micro-/ nanostructures, deeply mining the features of sensing signal [209] (e.g., response, area of peak, and speed), and enhancing catalysis effect using small NPs, clusters, or even singleatom catalyst [108] are the long-term challenges of hybrid gas-sensing materials to adapt the applications under realworld conditions [210,211]. The advances in knowledge in all our endeavors can be a foundation and useful experience for sensing technology, surface science, catalysis, fluidic mechanics, and microelectronics.…”

Multisensor Systems and Arrays for Medical Applications Employing Naturally-Occurring Compounds and Materials

“…The urine of healthy individuals is transparent and sterile. However, depending on the disease, urine can become cloudy, or have the atypical color and odor, that are related to changes in the urine content: some metabolites (e.g., urea, uric acid, creatinine, bilirubin, glucose), numerous proteins, including N-acetyl-β-D-glucosaminidase, IL18, albumin, neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin, urinary liver-type fatty acid binding protein, cystatin, and ionic composition as well [ 86 , 109 ]. Thereby, the diagnosis of kidney dysfunctions and injuries, arthritis, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases can be carried out by analysis of urine samples.…”