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Event
Chemical Society Seminar: Philippe Dauphin Ducharme - Molecular Monitoring in the Body using Electrochemical DNA-based Biosensors
Tuesday, March 9, 2021 13:00to14:30
Zoom link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/87597887772
Abstract:
Achieving continuous, real-time monitoring of a wide range of molecules directly in finger-pricked sized volumes of undiluted whole blood or directly in the living body would represent a significant feat in solving the paradigm of personalized medicine. At the moment, only two molecules can be monitored in this fashion: glucose and oxygen, thanks to the commercialization of the glucometer and the pulse oximeter. This limited offering of technologies ultimately impacts how we deliver and prescribe therapeutics to patients. It is common, for example, to be prescribed an antibiotic according to weight and age as opposed to how it is being metabolized in your body, which would inform on how to personalized dosing and increase positive treatment outcomes.Motivated by this goal, we are developing electrochemical DNA-based (E-DNA) biosensors. These sensors are comprised of a redox-reporter-modified and electrode-bound aptamer “probe” that upon target-binding alters the kinetics with which electrons exchange to/from the redox reporter via binding-induced conformational changes producing an easily measured change in current when the sensor is interrogated using square-wave voltammetry. Because this class of sensor rely on a biology-inspired principle and an electrochemical signaling mechanism, E-DNA biosensors readily deploy in finger-pricked sized volumes of undiluted whole blood and can be threaded in catheters for real-time molecular measurements in the veins of anesthetized and freely-ambulating rodents. In this presentation I will be discussing the fundamentals of this class of sensor and how it can be used to perform continuous monitoring and delivery of vancomycin, a narrow-therapeutic window antibiotic often used as a last resort to treat bacterial infections. All these advances in developing E-DNA biosensors are aimed toward developing new analytical tools for personalized medicine while improving our understanding of drug metabolism.