Surface nanoengineered contact lens as a wearable point-of-care diagnostics platform

• Detection of biomarkers is essential for disease prevention, diagnosis, and prognosis of early stage treatment. Ocular fluid is an extracellular fluid excreted from the tear gland. Several important markers from ocular fluid have been identified having significant clinical diagnostic value for various diseases. The contact lens is disposable, relatively cheap and serves as a platform to obtain direct intimate contact with ocular fluid and is therefore an attractive and a promising platform for point-of-care diagnostic tests. Here, we present an innovative concept of a wearable contact lens biosensor with nanoengineered biorecognition architecture based on a Layer-by-Layer (LbL) technique on the contact lens surface. This technique enables us to deposit multiple layers of biomolecules to create biorecognition layer under a mild aqueous physiological temperature and pH conditions. The fabrication of the biorecognition layer is simply through physical adsorption and has no restrictions with respect to the substrate size and topology (i.e. contact lens). The thickness of the resulting biorecognition layer is only hundreds of nanometers, and hence has minimal influence on the overall thickness of the contact lens, thus preserving the optical properties of the contact lens for vision correction. We have demonstrated that eye inflammation biomarkers such as interleukin (IL) can be captured in vitro with the contact lens, thus facilitating colorimetric affinity bioassays to measure the amount of interleukin. An in vitro ocular model composed of hydrogel-based artificial cornea and microfluidics was developed to study the performance of the contact lens biosensing platform. The contact  platform was able to detect IL-1α down to the physiological concentration, which is in the range of pg mL-1. There is a recent trend away from handheld devices towards wearable systems, illustrated by popular technology such as “Google glasses” and the “i-Watch”. We believe that the concept of wearable diagnostics holds significant promise as the next generation point-of-care diagnostic platform and that this contact lens-based approach is a convenient platform for a number of important applications.

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