(315f) Gold Leaf Electrodes for Affordable Biosensing in Resource-Limited Settings

Affordable, point-of-care diagnostics (POC) are critical to achieve health equity in low-resource settings (LRS). A prevalent sensing method for these diagnostics is electrochemical readout. Gold is commonly used as a substrate for electrochemical biosensors due to strong coupling with thiolated biomolecules. However, state-of-the-art gold electrode fabrication techniques are too laborious and costly for deployment in LRS. To make gold electrode fabrication possible in resource-limited settings, we have developed gold leaf electrodes that are affordable and easily fabricated without specialized equipment. In addition to being almost an order of magnitude cheaper than their commercially available counterparts, they also outperform commercially available screen-printed gold electrodes because they lack dopants that can interfere with analyte detection. The electrodes are paired with a CRISPR-based assay to detect human papillomavirus (HPV) from clinical samples. They have also been used to distinguish between respiratory viruses. The versatility of our work illustrates that gold leaf electrodes are a platform technology that can be expanded to detect any disease in LRS.