Printed nanoparticle sensors could enable personalised healthcare – Professional Engineering
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Personalised healthcare could transform medicine. By tracking and measuring patients’ conditions, doctors could deliver the precise combination of nutrients and medications they need, stabilising and improving conditions.
To make that possible, healthcare professionals need a way to continuously monitor certain biomarkers. Wearable and implantable sensors offer a way to do that – but until now, scaling up production has been a challenge.
A team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology hope to change that with a new technique for inkjet printing arrays of special nanoparticles, which could be used in mass production of long-lasting wearable sweat sensors. These could monitor biomarkers such as vitamins, hormones and medications in real time, allowing patients and physicians to track changes.
Wearable biosensors that incorporate the new nanoparticles have already been used to monitor metabolites in patients suffering from long Covid, and the levels of chemotherapy drugs in cancer patients.
“These are just two examples of what is possible,” said Professor Wei Gao, corresponding author of a paper describing the new technique. “There are many chronic conditions… that these sensors now give us the possibility to monitor continuously and non-invasively.”