Intra and extra-cellular glucose biosensor

Dr. Raphael Nascimento is a Medical Physicist with Masters and Ph.D. by University of Sao Paulo. He was a visiting student at University of California Santa Cruz and has a Postdoctoral at Instituto de Física of Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. Nowadays he is Adjunct Professor at Universidade Federal de Lavras.

This work will present, basically, two types of biosensors with great potential to become continuous glucose monitors. Both biosensors use the enzyme glucose oxidase as carbohydrate oxidation catalyzer. The first one presents a micro-metric structure and its goal is to quantify glucose concentration in an extracellular solution. This device is based in EGFET (Extended Gate Field Effect Transistor) system and uses FTO as substrate. Furthermore, two immobilization protocols were used to fix the enzyme to the FTO: chitosan (with final range of 1~5mM of glucose) and glutaraldehyde (with final range of 0~15mM of glucose). The second is a nano-structured biosensor based on nanopipette system and its goal is to quantify intracellular glucose concentration. With this device was possible to stipulate free glucose molecules inside different cell lines: between 0 and 2.8mM for human Fibroblasts; greater than 4.7 mM for MCF-7; and between 3.6 and 4.5 mM for MDA-MB-231.