DEVELOPMENT OF ELECTROCHEMICAL AND OPTICAL IMMUNOBIOSENSORS FOR DIAGNOSIS OF CHAGAS DISEASE

MELLI LJ; CIOCCHINI AE; REY SERANTES DA; BUSCAGLIA CA; FRAIGI L; MOINA CA; UGALDE JE; COMERCI DJ

Puerto Madryn, Chubut, Argentina

Congreso; SAIB 46th Annual Meeting.; 2010

Access to appropriate diagnostic tools is an essential component in the evaluation and improvement of global health. Most diagnostic tools currently available have been developed to be implemented in laboratories highly or moderately equipped; so, largely inadequate for meeting health needs in remote or impoverished settings with no or limited infrastructure. To solve this problem, point-of-care (POC) diagnostic platforms based on immunobiosensors emerge as an alternative. Immunobiosensors are detection systems that transduce a biological signal based on the antibody-antigen recognition into a measurable signal through physical, chemical, optical or electronic transducers. In this work, we have developed optical and electrochemical immunobiosensors for the diagnosis of Chagas disease. Recombinant antigens Ag1, Ag13, Ag36, SAPA and TSSA were purified as GST fusion proteins by affinity chromatography and immobilized on carboxi-modified magnetic beads. Functionalized micro-beads were incubated with sera from infected and non-infected patients and the immune complexes were detected using rabbit anti-human IgM/G Cy5 or peroxidase conjugate antibodies. Our results indicate that the immunobiosensors here developed can be use for the diagnosis of Chagas disease and reveal the potential of such biosensors for the development of POC diagnostic platforms for multiple infectious diseases.