A disposable microfluidic-integrated hand-held plasmonic platform for protein detection

Abstract Healthcare is in the midst of a transformative shift from centralized care to point-of-care (POC). In this regard, recent efforts have focused on integration of biosensing technologies with clinical management and existing healthcare systems to improve the effectiveness and quality of care. Plasmonic technologies in particular, have been used for multiple applications in biosensing, pharmaceutical industry, food quality monitoring, and healthcare. However, bulky-sized platforms, expensive instrumentation, incomprehensive benchmarking, laborious protocols, and time-consuming processing steps remain challenges to adopt biosensing platforms to the POC settings. Here, we present a hand-held biosensing platform that integrates a plasmonic detection modality with a microfluidic chip. As a biological target model, we assess hemoglobin—an iron carrying protein in red blood cells. We comprehensively perform theoretical simulations and kinetic calculations to benchmark the platform performance. Overall, this miniaturized platform provides label-free detection, simple configuration for user-interface, facile sampling, assay-time down to 15–30 min, and inexpensive disposable chips. Therefore, this platform will potentially accelerate the deployment of portable biosensing systems for the POC and primary care settings.