NANO-REGION - Nanotechnology at the service of diagnostic tools for cardiovascular diseases - A collaboration with La Rhazes srl

Cardiovascular diseases are a very frequent cause of serious deterioration in quality of life and, unfortunately, many times also a cause of death. Early recognition of the signs of a heart attack and rapid diagnosis enable timely medical intervention, which can significantly reduce the long-term consequences and possibly prevent cardiac arrest. Rhazes is a company working to address this challenge by developing innovative nanostructures.

The company turned to the NANO-REGION project, funded by the Interreg V-A Italy-Slovenia Programme 2014-2020, to address a problem related to the performance of biosensors: carbon nanostructures and gold electrodes coated with a protein layer, which act as sensors for heart attack markers. The NANO-REGION network was asked to visualise which proteins are present in the top coat and relate them to the performance of the sensor. Tests made on different electrodes of the same make, produced by the same procedure and with the same coating, showed different performance, which compromised the reproducibility of the sensor response. To understand why this was the case, an identification technique suitable for visualising the protein assembled on the electrode was used to assess the quality of the coating.

Epifluorescence microscopy indeed revealed important information on the coating characteristics of the samples. In general, for carbon nanostructured electrodes, the signal was observed to be low and not very diffuse, while gold electrodes provided a higher and more diffuse fluorescence signal than that observed for carbon nanostructures, but not yet completely uniform.

A key nanotechnological tool for analysing the surface of electrodes is Atomic Force Microscopy, which, in this case, was used to demonstrate that the surface roughness of gold electrodes can vary considerably depending on their different preparation, and this could be one of the possible sources of variability in the protein coating. The company was provided with information that a reduced surface roughness could probably help to better control the performance of biosensors.