***Archived: This is a past project, it is not on offer at the moment!***
Introduction:
Drug development and personalized therapy require accurate and frequent monitoring of the metabolic response of living tissues to treatments. Drug metabolism monitoring is a complex, slow and expensive process, mainly because of the unavailability of accurate, fast and inexpensive sensing devices that can detect and quantify several active drug compounds in parallel and multiple times a day. Devices for point-of-care measurements are necessary for patients undergoing treatment for cardiovascular diseases or for patients requiring personalized anti-cancer therapies. Miniaturized and parallel high-throughput-systems are becoming common tools for pharmaceutical research and applications. However, the literature on the development of miniaturized and parallel high-throughput-systems for drug testing is relatively scarce. In most of the published work, the main idea is to develop reliable systems able to monitor different drugs with the same sensor. However, the proposed technologies are limited to a small number of pathologies.
Project Description:
The purpose of this master project is to investigate the possibility to develop an integrated smart biosensor array system for drug metabolism analysis which apply for some widely spread and commonly used drugs in cardiovascular and anti-cancer treatments, while at the same time reducing analysis time and cost. In particular, an array of micro-fabricated electrodes will be integrated/functionalized by using nano-bio-structures, such as active sensing metallo-proteins, in order to realized a Multi-Parametric Protein Based Biosensing Array to be tested in drugs monitoring both for cardiovascular and anti-cancer personalized therapy applications.
Tasks:
- Testing the Ampérometric behaviour of the micro-fabricated array
- Bio-functionalization of the micro-fabricated array by using well know procedures
- Testing the array response in drug monitoring
- Design of a simple analog circuit which may be used to develop a drug monitoring integrated system based on the tested bio-functionalizations.
Requirements:
- Experience with electrical measurements with lab equipments
- Basic Knowledge on sensors and biosensors
- Theoretical knowledge on analog circuits design
- Interest in biomedical applications
This project was supervised by Sandro Carrara.
***Archived: This is a past project, it is not on offer at the moment!***