Next-Generation Continuous Metabolite Sensing toward Emerging Sensor Needs.

This article discusses the emergent biosensor technology focused on continuous biosensing of metabolites by non-invasive sampling of body fluids emphasized on physiological monitoring in mobility-constrained populations, resource-challenged settings, and harsh environments. The boom of innovative ideas and endless opportunities in healthcare technologies has transformed traditional medicine into a sustainable link between medical practitioners and patients to provide solutions for faster disease diagnosis. The future of healthcare is focused on empowering users to manage their own health. The confluence of big data and predictive analysis and the internet of things (IoT) technology have shown the potential of converting the abundant health profile data amassed from medical diagnosis of patients into useable information, whilst allowing caregivers to provide suitable treatment plans. The implementation of the IoT technology has opened up advanced approaches in real-time, continuous, remote monitoring of patients. Wearable, point-of-care biosensors are the future roadmap to providing direct, real-time information of health status to the user and medical professionals in this digitized era.

Evidence-based point-of-care technology development during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since December 2019, the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak that began in Wuhan, China has spread to nearly every continent and become a global health concern. Although much has been discovered about COVID-19 and its pathogenesis, the WHO has identified an immediate need to increase the levels of testing for COVID-19 and identify the stages of the disease accurately for appropriate action to be taken by clinicians and emergency care units. Harnessing technology for accurate diagnosis and staging will improve patient outcomes and minimize serious consequences of false-positive test results. Point-of-care technologies aim to intervene at every stage of the disease to quickly identify infected patients and asymptomatic carriers and stratify them for timely treatment. This requires the tests to be rapid, accurate, sensitive, simple to use and compatible with many body fluids. Mobile platforms are optimal for remote, small-scale deployment, whereas facility-based platforms at hospital centers and laboratory settings offer higher throughput. Here we review evidence-based point-of-care technologies in the context of the entire continuum of COVID-19, from early screening to treatment, and discuss their impact on improving patient outcomes.

Fabrication and characterization of implantable flushable electrodes for electric field-mediated drug delivery in a brain tissue-mimic agarose gel.

Every forty minutes, one person dies in the USA due to glioblastoma multiforme; a deadly form of brain cancer with an average five-year survival rate less than 3%. The current standard of care for treatment involves surgical resection of the accessible tumor followed by radiation therapy and concomitant chemotherapy. Despite their potency, delivering chemotherapeutic agents to the brain is limited by the highly selective blood-brain barrier, which prevents molecules >500 Da from reaching the brain. Other techniques, such as convection-enhanced delivery, controlled release by drug-loaded wafers or intracerebroventricular infusion have limited clinical utility due to unpredictable targeting and volume of drug distribution. We introduce a novel drug delivery technique that can use direct current electric fields to deliver charged chemotherapeutics to the site of brain parenchyma after tumor resection. We fabricate and characterize an implantable drug delivery system using flushable electrodes to deliver the charged chemotherapeutic or doxorubicin (+1) in a brain tissue-mimic agarose gel (0.2% w/v) model by electrophoresis. The optimized capillary-embedded electrode system exhibited a sustained movement of charged doxorubicin through nearly 3.5 mm in four hours, a distance for achieving effective intratumoral concentrations.