Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer in the United States and in other developed countries. Many victims of acute myocardial infarction, or heart attack, do not make it to the hospital alive, and a number of those who do don't survive once they get there. Time is of the essence in diagnosing and treating heart attacks, and although there are effective treatments such as primary angioplasty, fibrionolysis, and anti-thrombotic therapy - those treatments cannot be initiated until a heart attack is confirmed. The ability to confirm a heart attack is based on techniques that are not sufficiently rapid or definitive, and even with the many medical advances that have been made to date, there is a need for more efficient and accurate diagnosis in order to provide proper and quicker treatment to the patient. For many patients, use of cardiac markers for diagnosis is critical. Available analytical methods for biomarkers detection are labor- and time consuming, costly, require sophisticated equipment, and are not suitable for express diagnosis. There is a pressing need for new analytical methods that provide rapid and reliable identification of trace biomarkers. Optical biosensors based on Localized Surface Plasmon Resonance (LSPR) spectroscopy, providing detection in the low picomolar to high femtomolar concentration range, could fill this need. However, commercialization and wide use of LSPR sensors is impeded by the absence of highly uniform, reproducible, and inexpensive sensor platform with specific presently unknown geometric parameters. The proposed multi-phase SBIR project targets the development and commercialization of novel nanostructured LSPR sensor platform utilizing a highly ordered array of uniform parallel metal nanowires anchored in a self-organized nanotemplate. The Phase I objective is to demonstrate feasibility of the proposed approach by fabricating and testing a biosensor for C-Reactive Protein - one of the acute myocardial infarction markers. The approach will enable a broad family of portable sensor systems and diagnostic kits for specific and sensitive detection of biomarkers for reliable express diagnosis of various cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes, and infectious diseases, biological molecules in health care, consumer and industry-based environmental monitoring, agricultural and food sectors, and in defense and homeland security applications. The project addresses one the most significant problems in public health protection: reliable express diagnosis of a heart attack and other diseases in order to provide proper and quicker treatment to the patient. The development of novel advanced sensors for detection of biomarkers - molecular signatures of a specific disease - is proposed. The proposed sensing technology will enable a broad family of portable sensor systems and diagnostic kits for efficient and accurate diagnosis of various cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes, and infectious diseases, and for the detection of biological molecules of interest, chemical agents and biohazards in health care, consumer and industry-based environmental monitoring, agricultural and food sectors, and in defense and homeland security applications. ? ? ?
