The goal of this project is to develop an innovative biosensor for the non-invasive, painless and real-time detection of volatile biomarkers in the exhaled breath of patients. Volatile biomarkers have been identified for several diseases including cancers, diabetes, cystic fibrosis and neurodegeneration. A miniaturized system for fast and simple breath-analysis would not only improve the early detection of these pathologies but also enable point-of-care monitoring of patients either in medical institutions or at home. Different electronic noses are in development (or even in use for diagnosing asthma), however their generalisation in reliable medical diagnosis devices is mainly hindered by their poor versatility. The main challenge is to quantitatively and simultaneously detect several volatile biomarkers with high specificity and selectivity. The ideal technology would be one which mimicked the natural olfactory systems that recognize odours by combinatorial analysis of receptor responses. Inspired by this biological example, this project aims at integrating natural olfactory receptors into two state-of-the-art technologies: Ion Channel-Coupled Receptors (ICCRs) and single-walled Carbon NanoTube-Field Effect Transistors (swCNT-FETs). ICCRs are original biosensors created by fusion of G Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) with an ion channel. The recognition of a chemical compound by the GPCR is transduced into an electrical signal by the ion channel. Mammalian olfactory receptors are GPCRs, and the objective of this 5-year project is to engineer an original library of olfactory ICCRs for multiplex detection of volatile biomarkers. To detect the electrical signal with very high sensitivity and at the nanometric scale, ICCRs will be interfaced with swCNT-FET transistors by coating the carbon nanotubes with ICCR-containing nanovesicles. The recent detection of a biomarker with an ICCR-swCNT-FET device by project members demonstrates the feasibility of this approach.

Wireless testbeds have become an essential tool to develop and validate innovative wireless solutions. However, due to the increasing diversity of wireless solutions and competing radio technologies, along with the ever more stringent requirements on the reliability of test results, wireless test facilities have evolved to very complex systems with steep learning curves for innovators. To speed up and facilitate the experimentation process, to lower its cost and to enhance the uptake of future non- and pre-standard solutions, the WiSHFUL project is determined to lower the experimentation threshold by developing flexible, scalable, open software architectures and programming interfaces for prototyping novel wireless solutions for a variety of applications ranging from healthcare to smart cities, supporting players in high value-add markets with considerable growth potential. Key features of WiSHFUL include (1) unified radio control, providing developers with deep control of physical and medium access components without requiring deep knowledge of the radio hardware platform and (2) unified network control allowing the rapid creation, modification, and prototyping of protocols across the entire stack. WiSHFUL will also create a testbed-on-the-move, consisting of portable facilities that can be deployed easily and efficiently at any location, allowing validation of innovative wireless solutions in the real world (with realistic propagation and interference characteristics) and involving real users. The usefulness of these facilities will be confirmed by participation of industrial and academic partners through open calls for experimentation. In addition, we envision to extend these facilities with the capability to experiment with emerging wireless technologies such as millimeter wave communications, full-duplex and massive MIMO in the scope of open calls for extensions.