Disease Detection with Molecular Biomarkers: From Chemistry of Body Fluids to Nature-Inspired Chemical Sensors.

This article aims to review nature-inspired chemical sensors for enabling fast, relatively inexpensive, and minimally (or non-) invasive diagnostics and follow-up of the health conditions. It can be achieved via monitoring of biomarkers and volatile biomarkers, that are excreted from one or combination of body fluids (breath, sweat, saliva, urine, seminal fluid, nipple aspirate fluid, tears, stool, blood, interstitial fluid, and cerebrospinal fluid). The first part of the review gives an updated compilation of the biomarkers linked with specific sickness and/or sampling origin. The other part of the review provides a didactic examination of the concepts and approaches related to the emerging chemistries, sensing materials, and transduction techniques used for biomarker-based medical evaluations. The strengths and pitfalls of each approach are discussed and criticized. Future perspective with relation to the information and communication era is presented and discussed.

Synergy between nanomaterials and volatile organic compounds for non-invasive medical evaluation.

This article is an overview of the present and ongoing developments in the field of nanomaterial-based sensors for enabling fast, relatively inexpensive and minimally (or non-) invasive diagnostics of health conditions with follow-up by detecting volatile organic compounds (VOCs) excreted from one or combination of human body fluids and tissues (e.g., blood, urine, breath, skin). Part of the review provides a didactic examination of the concepts and approaches related to emerging sensing materials and transduction techniques linked with the VOC-based non-invasive medical evaluations. We also present and discuss diverse characteristics of these innovative sensors, such as their mode of operation, sensitivity, selectivity and response time, as well as the major approaches proposed for enhancing their ability as hybrid sensors to afford multidimensional sensing and information-based sensing. The other parts of the review give an updated compilation of the past and currently available VOC-based sensors for disease diagnostics. This compilation summarizes all VOCs identified in relation to sickness and sampling origin that links these data with advanced nanomaterial-based sensing technologies. Both strength and pitfalls are discussed and criticized, particularly from the perspective of the information and communication era. Further ideas regarding improvement of sensors, sensor arrays, sensing devices and the proposed workflow are also included.

Nanoscale Sensor Technologies for Disease Detection via Volatolomics.

The detection of many diseases is missed because of delayed diagnoses or the low efficacy of some treatments. This emphasizes the urgent need for inexpensive and minimally invasive technologies that would allow efficient early detection, stratifying the population for personalized therapy, and improving the efficacy of rapid bed-side assessment of treatment. An emerging approach that has a high potential to fulfill these needs is based on so-called "volatolomics", namely, chemical processes involving profiles of highly volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted from body fluids, including breath, skin, urine and blood. This article presents a didactic review of some of the main advances related to the use of nanomaterial-based solid-state and flexible sensors, and related artificially intelligent sensing arrays for the detection and monitoring of disease with volatolomics. The article attempts to review the technological gaps and confounding factors related to VOC testing. Different ways to choose nanomaterial-based sensors are discussed, while considering the profiles of targeted volatile markers and possible limitations of applying the sensing approach. Perspectives for taking volatolomics to a new level in the field of diagnostics are highlighted.

Profiles of Volatile Biomarkers Detect Tuberculosis from Skin.

Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease that threatens >10 million people annually. Despite advances in TB diagnostics, patients continue to receive an insufficient diagnosis as TB symptoms are not specific. Many existing biodiagnostic tests are slow, have low clinical performance, and can be unsuitable for resource-limited settings. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a rapid, sputum-free, and cost-effective triage test for real-time detection of TB is urgently needed. This article reports on a new diagnostic pathway enabling a noninvasive, fast, and highly accurate way of detecting TB. The approach relies on TB-specific volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that are detected and quantified from the skin headspace. A specifically designed nanomaterial-based sensors array translates these findings into a point-of-care diagnosis by discriminating between active pulmonary TB patients and controls with sensitivity above 90%. This fulfills the WHO's triage test requirements and poses the potential to become a TB triage test.

Programmed Nanoparticles for Tailoring the Detection of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases and Irritable Bowel Syndrome Disease via Breathprint.

Chemical sensors based on programmable molecularly modified gold nanoparticles are tailored for the detection and discrimination between the breathprint of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). The sensors are examined in both lab- and real-world clinical conditions. The results reveal a discriminative power accuracy of 81% between IBD and IBS and 75% between Crohn's and Colitis states.