Point-of-care (POC) biosensors enable the on-site detection of various analytes from a single specimen in resource-constrained settings, in a timely manner, allowing immediate clinical management decisions. Of utter importance is to detect pathogens related to severe infections, such as those generated from skin wounds. In this respect, various DNA amplification strategies were implemented on solid supports for the genomic identification of the infectious agents.

Owing to the flexible platform technologies which are thin, light, flexible and inexpensive, skin based wearables have been developed for monitoring heart rate, body temperature, pH etc. Despite the aforementioned advances in wearable POC devices, the development of wearable devices for nucleic acids detection is just at the beggining.

In Bio-Iso-Pat, the teams from Laboratory of Nanobiotechnology (LN-IMT) from the Institute of Microtechnologies Bucharest (IMT) and Molecular Pathology Laboratory from Emergency University Hospital Bucharest (Spitalul Universitar de Urgenta Bucuresti – SUUB) aim to develop an eco-friendly, flexible, patch-like biosensor coupled with a microfluidic system for the isothermal amplification of gene fragments specific to various pathogens found in skin lesions. Briefly, the wearable sensor will be made of a flexible, eco- and skin-friendly support onto which specific primers will be attached. The flexible support will be sealed with a PDMS microfluidic structure for creating the reaction chambers necessary for the isothermal amplification. DNA extraction-free solutions for nucleic acid amplification will be explored. The primers existing in solution will be fluorescently labelled and the detection will be carried using laser beams at corresponding wavelengths.