Flexible electronic materials and devices toward portable immunoassays

Abstract

Biomarker identification is a tried-and-true method that can provide precise biological information for disease diagnosis. Prompt diagnosis, disease progression monitoring, therapy efficacy evaluation, and prognosis assessment of cancers all benefit from sensitive, rapid, and precise measurement of significant biomarkers employing chemical and immunological approaches. The study of biomolecules and immunoassay evaluations can profit greatly from recent advancements in flexible electronic materials and technologies, which provide amazing flexibility, affordability, mobility, and integration. However, an overview of the implementation of portable immunoassays in conjunction with flexible electronic devices is rare to come by. This review focuses on recent breakthroughs in flexible electronic materials and devices for portable biomarker testing, which provides an extensive summary of flexible electrical components and sensing-capable devices, emphasizing their adaptability in the construction of biosensing platforms. These platforms employ various signal transduction systems to record biological affinity recognition events, including pressure, temperature, electrical parameters, colorimetric signals, and other physical features. The challenges for portable, integrated, intelligent, and multifunctional immunoassays based on flexible sensing devices are also discussed. The portable immunoassays with flexible electronics would unlock the potential to transform clinical diagnostics into non-clinical personalized treatments and achieve home-based point-of-care testing for daily monitoring.

Keywords

biomarker / electronic materials / electronics applications / flexible devices / flexible electronics / portable immunoassay / sensors

Author summay

Yingxin Zhang and Bing Xu contributed equally to this work.