6 Case studies of impedimetric biosensors for medical applications

Many research reports have been published in recent years detailing the impedimetric detection of various types of medically-relevant analytes and/or biomarkers, including small molecules such as metabolites and drugs, proteins and peptides, nucleic acids, and whole microorganisms such as pathogenic viruses and bacteria. Traditional, detection methods within clinical biochemistry are composed of several steps; sample collection, sample preparation or labelling, multi-step sample incubation and long processing times, sometimes up to weeks. Many of these methods, such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR), require expensive equipment and skilled laboratory technicians. Biosensors offer a much faster, inexpensive diagnosis that can be obtained in a matter of minutes at the point-of-care. As discussed previously, impedimetric biosensors offer the key advantages of small device size, low sample volumes, usually label-free detection with minimum or no sample preparation steps, at low cost.