Contribution received to the FET Flagships consultation: Biosensors for Point-of-Care Applications

Sebastiano Cavallaro, Institute of Neurological Sciences - Italian National Research Council

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The worldwide trend in healthcare is to deliver a personalised medicine. Over the last decade, enormous progress has been made on recording the health state of an individual patient down to the molecular level of gene activity and genomic information. However, the hope to use all this information for personalized medicine that is to tailor medical treatment to the needs of an individual, remains largely unfulfilled. Moreover, the conventional diagnostic techniques are time-consuming and require centralized laboratories, experienced personnel and bulky equipment. To tackle this challenge, there is a strong need of cutting-edge diagnostic techniques that provide faster, more accurate and more comprehensive diagnoses of diseases. To this regard, the micro- and nanoscale technologies for biology have achieved spectacular progress as an enabling technology to drive long-term sustainability, opening new opportunities and providing powerful tools in the fields such as genomics, proteomics, molecular diagnostics, and high throughput screening. These microscale biosensors promise a low-cost, rapid, and simple-to-operate analytical tools for applications in a variety of common medical conditions and can be used to develop more portable devices for point-of-care applications. Despite the impressive number of publications on biosensors in the diagnostics field, the commercialisation of this technology is feasible only minimally in the near future. This can partially be due to the need to prove the stability and reliability of the biosensorsThe overall objective of the action is to develop a biosensor device able to perform multiple tests on a small sample volume in a variety of clinical settings, to give out the diagnosis of some diseases in one single test and, simultaneously the information on the therapy to follow. This will be achieved by exploiting breakthroughs at the confluences of bio-, micro- and nano- technologies to create a low-cost non-invasive intelligent diagnostic system. The rationale for the proposed research is that once developed, the genomic test will represent a potential support to diagnosis and to predict the efficacy of therapeutic treatment and will allow a relevant advancement towards the concretization of a medicine more personalized, with lower collateral effects for the patients and lower costs for the health.

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