Go with your gut: novel biosensor SENSBIT mimics the gut’s defenses
A novel biosensor that mimics the gut’s defenses provides reliable, continuous molecular monitoring for a week in rats.
Researchers from Stanford University (CA, USA) have developed a biosensor that provides reliable, real-time molecular monitoring. The system remains sensitive and stable in live rats for a week, evading the immune system’s attacks by mimicking the gut’s defenses. The system could enable to early detection of a range of diseases.
Continuously monitoring the molecular state of the human body could be transformative by enabling the early detection of diseases like cancer and optimizing drug delivery. However, developing these devices, known as biosensors, has proven challenging, and current biosensors only function briefly.
The team previously designed a molecular switch that binds to small molecules of interest in the body, providing a readable signal output for continuous measurement of their concentrations. These switches, however, are prone to degradation by the body’s immune system. While previous efforts to hide the switches in nanoporous electrodes enabled the measurement of drug levels inside the tumor of a live rat for the first time, the system was still degraded.
“We needed a material system that could sense the target while protecting the molecular switches, and that’s when I thought, wait, how does biology solve this problem?” commented first author Yihang Chen.
The team then designed the Stable Electrochemical Nanostructured Sensor for Blood In situ Tracking (SENSBIT) system, which mimics the gut’s natural defenses. The sensor has a 3D nanoporous gold surface, which shields its sensitive elements from interference, and a protective coating modeled after gut mucosa, which helps prevent degradation.
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The team found that SENSBIT retained over 70% of its signal after a month in undiluted human serum and over 60% after a week in the blood vessels of live rats, showing the system remains stable and sensitive even after continuous exposure to flowing blood inside living animals.
While other strategies are available for continuous molecular monitoring, SENSBIT appears to be significantly better than similar devices tested in blood, providing reliable, real-time molecular monitoring in complex biological fluids.
“This work began more than a dozen years ago and we have been steadily advancing this technology,” said Tom Soh, senior author of the paper. “This order-of-magnitude improvement in whole-blood sensor longevity over existing technologies is a huge advancement toward next-generation biosensors.”
