Seminari VHIR - Dra. Laura Lechuga Gómez "Nanophotonic point-of-care biosensors for early Sepsis diagnosis and treatment follow-up"

Dra. Laura Lechuga Gómez, Nanobiosensors and Bioanalytical Applications Group Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2) CSIC, BIST and CIBER-BBN- Barcelona

"Nanophotonic point-of-care biosensors for early Sepsis diagnosis and treatment follow-up"

The need to monitor the human health in a fast and reliable way is one of the challenges faced by humanity in the 21st century. Modern diagnostics is demanding novel tools that could enable quick, accurate, sensitive, reliable and cost-effective results so that appropriate treatments can be implemented in time, leading to improved outcomes. Portable point-of-care (POC) devices, able to deliver an instant diagnostics, are becoming a reality thanks to the last advances in nanotechnology, nanobiosensors, lab-on-a-chip, and smart-phone technologies, which promise to surpass the existing challenges, opening the door to a global diagnostics access.
The driving force of our research is to achieve such ultrasensitive POC platforms for the early detection of diseases (as sepsis) using novel nanophotonic biosensors and custom-designed biofunctionalization protocols, accomplishing the requirements of disposability and portability. We have demonstrated the suitability of our technology for the label-free diagnostics, with extremely sensitivity and selectivity and directly in human fluids, of infectious microorganisms (at few cfu/mL), colorectal cancer biomarkers or microRNAs at aM level related to cancer progression, among others. In the case of sepsis, our novel technology features detection sensitivity at the level of a single bacterial cell, enabling the accurate categorization of bacteria-infected sepsis patients from healthy individuals and non-infectious SIRS patients, without false positives/negatives.

Short Bio
PhD in Chemistry from the University Complutense of Madrid (Spain), Full Professor at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). She is the Head of the Nanobiosensors and Bioanalytical Applications Group. The principal focus of her research is the technological development of photonic (nanoplasmonics and silicon-based) biosensors, their integration in portable lab-on-a-chip platforms and their application for clinical and environmental diagnostics. She has published over 250 articles, book chapters and proceedings, has 8 families of patents and has presented her work in more than 300 invited talks. She has co-founded two spin-offs and is Associate editor of the IEEE Photonics Journal, J. Optics and Laser Technology (Elsevier) and Analysts (Royal Society of Chemistry). She has received several prizes and recognitions as the Prize of Physics, Innovation and Technology from the Spanish Royal Society of Physics and BBVA Foundation in 2016.

Host: Shock, Organ Dysfunction and Resuscitation- jcruiz@vhebron.net