Project develops platform for the detection of cholesterol

The sensor, display and battery will all be based on inkjet printing technology to create a single-use, disposable device that should be easy and relatively cheap to manufacture.

‘Although there are tests at the moment just related to free cholesterol, one of the objectives of our programme is to bring that to the next stage of development in looking at assays specific for both LDL and HDL cholesterol, bad and good cholesterol if you will,’ said Tony Killard from the University of the West of England in Bristol.

The other collaborators include Liverpool and Dublin City universities, the Technical Research Centre of Finland and industrial partner Alere.

Killard’s team is responsible for the bioelectrochemical sensor, which uses a whole blood spot as input. It first uses the enzyme cholesterol oxidase to generate hydrogen peroxide, which can be detected with a silver-based surfactant to be converted into an electrical signal. That raw data is then analysed using the fledgling technology of organic electronic computing.