I-Corps: Customer discovery for silicon nanowire biosensor

University Of Iowa, Iowa City IA

Investigators

Abstract

The commercial potential of this I-Corps project will be that it will further develop a sensor to detect lung cancer without a bioposy and to give more specific diagnostics for this cancer thus enabling targeted drug therapy. This will decrease the cost for treating cancer, improving survival rates of lung cancer, and provide less invasive and more accurate diagnostics. The technology is a platform technology to enable low cost effective tests for all diseases that cause the body to release neoantigens, anti-bodies, or DNA mutations. The developed sensor is more sensitive than existing sensors and will be able to detect the type of cancer in the blood of patients that have cancer. This will potentially allow doctors to prescribe targeted drug therapy and will be able to detect cancer earlier, target a patient's cancer without needing a biopsy, and potentially lead to a higher survival rate. This I-Corps project will explore the commercial potential of a nanowire biosensor platform that is more sensitive than existing sensors and will be able to detect a type of lung cancer in the blood of patients. The nanowire biosensor platform is able to measure DNA at high sensitivities because it uses nanowires that have a very high surface area and are sensitive to the atmosphere around them. The proposed platform technology utilizes arrays of vertically aligned nanowires. Using this device design, sensors with over a million nanowires per sensor have been developed by the team. The biosensor has been used for prostate specific antigen (PSA) detection and have positive preliminary results. This new method of detection enables sensors with nanowire arrays versus a single nanowire, resulting in higher sensitivity devices.