Recent Advances in Biosensors for Healthcare Applications

Dear Colleagues,

Biosensors have traditionally played a major role in areas such as healthcare, drug discovery, food safety, environmental monitoring, homeland security and defence, among many others. More recently, with the growing interest in distributed sensing approaches—such as in point of care and telemedicine—biosensing platforms to generate information on-site in real time have become increasingly important. A centrepiece in the successful development of these tools is the compromise between the analytical figures of merit and some practical aspects regarding robustness, operational simplicity and cost.

The problem of sensor affordability has been extensively explored during the last decade with the use of low-cost substrates such as paper, textile, rubber and plastics. While there are still ongoing efforts in this area, the progress achieved so far offers an attractive outlook for the development of affordable chemical sensing devices.

Operational simplicity remains one of the most challenging aspects of distributed biosensors, since any activity involving the user—sampling and sample conditioning such as dilution, pH adjustment, etc.—must be minimized. The elimination of user intervention is extensively explored using wearable and implantable devices, but there are still limitations regarding the type of information that these approaches can provide. For this reason, determinations in a single drop of whole, undiluted samples—mostly blood—are still the norm. Simple sample conditioning steps can be performed using the capillary-driven flow through cellulosic substrates. Ion-exchange membranes and multi-electrode arrays have been used to minimize interferences and improve selectivity.

All these solutions, however, require a trade-off between overall complexity and performance. Ideally, distributed tools must provide suitable sensitivity, be impervious to the matrix components and match the linear ranges of interest. This requires detection approaches that show high sensitivity, wide (or adjustable) linear ranges, instrumental simplicity and matrix-insensitive response. This will open up a new avenue for the development of affordable, simple and robust biosensors for decentralized biochemical analysis.

The aims of this Special Issue “Recent Advances in Biosensors for Healthcare Applications” are to highlight and share new approaches, solutions and applications of biosensors directed towards healthcare improvement. Studies including the validation of the suggested biosensor with real samples and against laboratory gold standards will have higher consideration for being accepted.

Both review articles and research papers are welcome.

Keywords

• Electrochemical biosensors
• Optical biosensors
• Self-powered biosensors
• Lab-on-a-chip platforms
• Bioassays
• Microfluidics
• Screen-printed biosensors

Dr. Rocío Cánovas
Dr. Marc Parrilla
Guest Editors

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• electrochemical biosensors
• optical biosensors
• self-powered biosensors
• lab-on-a-chip platforms
• bioassays
• microfluidics
• screen-printed biosensors