Research Projects

Female hormones play a pivotal role in various facets of women's health, influencing critical processes such as menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause. Oestradiol, the primary form of the estrogen hormone, significantly impacts major organs in both males and females, including blood vessels, bones, muscles, and the brain, particularly during reproductive years. Monitoring oestradiol is crucial across a person's lifespan, from infancy to old age, and holds vital importance for infertility management and general physiological surveillance. Compared to alternative fertility monitoring methods, such as basal thermometers or urine luteinizing hormone-based approaches, serum oestradiol analysis stands out for providing timely and accurate information. It serves as the gold standard for monitoring ovulation induction with gonadotrophins and plays a crucial role in menopausal women and individuals undergoing hormone replacement therapy. Traditional methods involving mass spectrometry and immunoassays are plagued by bulky equipment, low detection throughput, and invasive blood draws. These render them impractical for at-home remote use, especially for quantifying pM-level oestradiol in the menstrual cycle. Recognizing these challenges, there is a pressing need for highly sensitive and accurate on-site quantification of female hormone levels in non-invasively accessible biological fluids. Electrochemical techniques, in contrast, offer numerous advantages, such as low cost, high sensitivity, fast response, portability, and easy operation, making them ideal for hormone detection. In this context, smartphone-integrated paper-based electrochemical screening platforms emerge as promising solutions, offering benefits such as excellent selectivity, cost-effectiveness, non-invasiveness, and easy result interpretation. This project aims to develop a small, lightweight, and user-friendly smartphone-integrated Potentiostat based on an aptamer switch for in situ automatic electrochemical monitoring of female hormones with sub-picomolar sensitivity, particularly in remote areas with limited medical facilities. The nanobiosensor incorporates a biorecognition interface modified with a selective DNA aptamer facing a nanomaterial-based detection working electrode modified to capture single-stranded DNA for indirect target detection. The Potentiostat will be designed to be affordable and accessible to a broad audience. Additionally, a user-friendly smartphone application will be developed to analyze data collected by the Potentiostat, providing real-time results and enabling the early detection of female hormones. Notably, the fulfillment of hormone monitoring aligns with the third sustainable development goal (SDG3) of the United Nations, explicitly targeting 3.4 and 3.7 in promoting well-being and ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive healthcare services by 2030.

Infertility, Nanobiosensors, Paper based devices, Female hormones, Smartphone, Potentiostat.