Real-Time Monitoring of Post-Surgical and Post-Traumatic Eye Injuries Using Multilayered Electrical Biosensor Chip

Lack of current techniques for the early monitoring of bleb leaks and other post-traumatic or post-surgical ocular injury has posed an unmet clinical need for the development of new techniques. Present evaluation techniques use either subjective or nonquantitative approaches. At present, there are no FDA approved ocular devices that can directly measure ascorbic acid (AA) concentration levels for both tear film (TF) and aqueous humor (AH) at point-of-care (POC) level. Toward this aim, we present a novel POC quantitative assay, called the ocular biosensor device, which can be used to evaluate the integrity of the anterior surface of the eye by measuring the concentration of AA in TF and AH. Herein, we utilize a novel scientific engineering approach for the development of a disposable paper based POC ocular biosensor strip. A grafted poly(styrene)-block-poly(acrylic acid) (PS-b-PAA) and graphene platelet composite with contour based μ-electrodes design (CBμE) exhibit a highly sensitive platform to perform electrochemical immunosensing technique to study clinical samples that have small volumes like tear fluid. Samples used in this study were collected clinically from subjects undergoing therapeutic anterior chamber paracentesis. The proposed biosensor reports the level of AA concentration on an electronic screen, making the results easy to read, efficient, and reliable.