The capability for monitoring of levels of protein biomarkers with high sensitiüty and specificity is required to improve early diagnosis, treatment and prognosis of diseases. Nanomechanical L¡iosensors enable label-free detection of biomolecules. These deüces can be produced at the wafer scale by adopting semiconductor technology which results into a large number of identical devices at relatively low cost, In addition, tñe size of these devices has been increasingly reduced which leads to higher deüce density and, more importantly, implies higher sensitivity, In addition, high throughput detection can be readily achieved by f'abricating hundreds of cantilevers in anays and by the fast read-out of their response by optical or electrical techniques. However, this technology is still far to be established as a u'idespread biosensing technique due to its ümited reproducibility, poor understanding of the detected signal and extreme dependence of the biosensor performance on the conformation and nanoscale arrangement of the biomolecular receptors. Here we identify three aspects that woutd improve the performance of nanomechanical bionsensors: i) development of simple and advanced optical transduction instrumentation, ii) statistical analvisis of large scale biological reactions, and iii) implementation of novel concepts based on optomechanics.

Comunicación presentada en el 9th Nanomechanical sensing workshop, celebrado en Bombay del 6 al 8 de junio de 2012.

Peer Reviewed