Facilitating earlier diagnosis of cardiovascular disease through point-of-care biosensors: A review

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) accounts for 30% of all global deaths and is predicted to dominate in the coming years, despite vast improvements in medical technology. Current clinical methods of assessing an individual’s cardiovascular health include blood tests to monitor relevant biomarker levels as well as varying imaging modalities such as electrocardiograms, computed tomography, and angiograms to assess vasculature. As informative as these tools are, they each require lengthy scheduling, preparation, and highly trained personnel to interpret the results before any information is accessible to patients, often leading to delayed treatment, which can be fatal. A point-of-care (POC) sensor platform is thus paramount in rapid and early diagnosis of CVD. Among the many POC detection platforms, including established optical and mechanical methods, electrochemical-based detection mechanisms have become increasingly desirable because of their superior sensitivity, low cost, and label-free detection. Specifically, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) has demonstrated remarkable abilities in low-level (femtomolar) detection of several clinically useful biomarkers and has been reported in CVD diagnostic applications. In this review, we provide an in-depth overview of prevalent CVD diseases and clinically relevant proteomic biomarkers for assessing them. Subsequently, we discuss the ongoing development of POC sensors for CVD, highlighting the current clinical gold standard, potential alternative modalities, and electrochemical methodologies previously successful in quantifying specific biomarkers approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). A discussion of EIS highlighting the attributes and capabilities of novel analysis algorithms is included to showcase the possibility of simultaneous dual-marker detection.