Motorized sensors aim to improve and accelerate early-stage disease diagnosis

Early treatment of life-threatening diseases such as cancer is the key to improving patients’ chances of survival. However, the diseases are much more difficult to diagnose in their early stages because people often have not yet developed symptoms and only traces can be found in their bodies.

The Cockrell School of Engineering researchers want to make it easier to catch disease early in the process by improving patient outlooks and lifting some of the burden from the medical system. Researchers created an approach using a nanosensor to accelerate the detection of biomarker traces for early disease detection while maintaining high levels of sensitivity.

“It is very important to detect diseases early and accurately, and to do so you need to be able to find very low concentrations of biomarkers,” said Donglei (Emma) Fan, associate professor in Walker’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, who has led research published recently in the journal ACS Nano. “And people want to know their results quickly and don’t have to wait hours or days.”

Fan imagines his approach could help rapid disease tests people can perform at home or at work, keeping them out of doctors’ offices and hospitals unnecessarily. In a hospital setting, accelerating testing allows medical staff to run large batches of diagnostics in hours rather than days.

“Everyone can be their own nurse to some degree, and then if there are any problems they can talk to a doctor,” Fan said.

Super small sensors are important for disease diagnostics, but they face problems. The smaller the sensor, the more it responds to tiny molecules. But the trade-off for sensitivity is a slower turnaround time. The longer it takes the sensor to connect and identify molecules, the greater the risk of contamination, potentially reducing the accuracy of the test.

Fan’s detection approach aims to solve the difficult problem of slow detection with ultra-small and highly sensitive devices. The approach increases the speed of a test by four times compared to common detection techniques. Fan’s technique could reduce a detection from an hour or a couple of hours to minutes.

And the key to this innovation lies in the motorization of the sensor. Adding motion by rotating the device displaces the liquid sample, making contact between molecules and sensors much faster.

The team is publishing its methodologies with the hope that other researchers and manufacturers will use the information to improve their sensors. Fan said the technology could be applicable to any type of sensor and any instance of detecting molecules in a liquid solution, including things like crime scene forensics to find DNA.

This project is in line with Fan’s research, discovery and development of micro / nanomotors and machines. Two years ago, his team developed a first method for light-controlled electric nanomotors.

Fan notes that the team has even more work to do and the next step is to accelerate the engine while maintaining control, which should further reduce test response times.

“What we have shown is not the limit,” Fan said. “If we rotate the sensor faster, we can get even faster detection.”