Fabrication methods for a gel-based separation-free device for whole blood glucose detection

Han Zhang; Yongjian Yang; Jing Dai; Arum Han

doi:10.1016/j.mex.2021.101236

Fabrication methods for a gel-based separation-free device for whole blood glucose detection

MethodsX. 2021 Jan 20:8:101236. doi: 10.1016/j.mex.2021.101236. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Han Zhang¹, Yongjian Yang¹, Jing Dai¹, Arum Han^{1

2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Electrical and Computer engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843, USA.
² Department of Biomedical Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843, USA.
³ Center for Remote Health Technologies & Systems, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843, USA.

Abstract

In this paper, we describe two fabrication methods (well array-based and biopsy punching-based) of gel disks to construct a gel-based point-of-care (POC) diagnosis device for direct colorimetric measurement of human whole blood glucose without any extra blood separation step. The gel disks are made of Polyethylene glycol (PEG) diacrylate (PEG-DA) containing immobilized glucose colorimetric assay reagents. The performances of three types of PEG-DA gel (molecular weight: 575, 3,400, and 10,000) based sensors as well as the two fabrication methods were investigated.•The fabricated devices enabled colorimetric whole blood glucose sensing assay without the need for blood cell separation•The biopsy punching-based gel disk fabrication method provided less variation on the fabricated gel disks.

Keywords: Blood separation; Glucose detection; Hydrogel; Point of care diagnosis.