Tag Archive for: biosensors

AWSensors at Biosensors 2016

AWSensors technology at Biosensors 2016

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May 13th 2016

Visit the booth of our distributor, Bio-Logic, to see our new products

Just one week left for Biosensors 2016! AWSensors technology will be at the most prestigious congress on biosensing research to be held at Gothenburg, Sweden from May 25th to 26th. We are pleased to invite you to see our platforms at the booth of Bio-Logic, our OEM distributor. There, you will see how our platform works.

Our equipment is the only quartz crystal microbalance that allows:

–           Detection and characterization of interface phenomena with high sensitivity (up to 0.05 ng/cm2)

–           Use of different kind of sensors simultaneously.

Our technology is based on two fundamental principles:

  1. Use of high fundamental frequency acoustic resonators (100-150 MHz) that provides a large increase in sensitivity.
  2. Use of a novel method for characterizing these sensors which keeps noise at very low level.

As a result, an improvement in the limit of detection (LOD) of 2 orders of magnitude compared to traditional acoustic sensors is obtained.

Do not miss the opportunity to check the advantages of our new technology and meet AWSensors founder, Prof. Antonio Arnau. He is coordinator of the International Network of Piezoelectric Transducers Research and Applications (PETRA) and has wide expertise on bioelectronics and acoustic wave biosensors.

Dr. Arnau will attend the Post Congress Symposium in Cancer Diagnostics to be held on Saturday 28 May inmediately following Biosensors 2016. AWSensors is currently coordinating LiqBiopSens European Project to develop a new liquid biopsy platform for early detection of colorectal cancer.

Bioeconomy in Spain

Bioeconomy in the Spanish Public Budget for 2016

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Aug 25th 2015

Spanish Parliament starts to debate today the public budget for the next year. So that, we would like to review what are the plans to invest in research and innovation. According to the budget for the Secretary of Innovation, bioeconomy will be one of the priorities for the Spanish Government in 2016.

Bioeconomy figure; food, biomass, public health, energy security, sustainable production, economic and social development

What is bioeconomy?

The bioeconomy definition according to the EFIB (European Forum for the Bioeconomy) is the following:

Bioeconomy encompasses the production of renewable biological resources and their conversion into food, feed, bio-based products and bioenergy via innovative and efficient technologies.

AWSensors tech has important applications in bioeconomy such as environmental monitoring, secure food and water, bioenergy or biomaterials. EU is promoting and funding projects in these fields in order to make the transition to a more resource efficient society and the Spanish Government is following this policy too.

Spain will boost the Bioeconomy Strategy in the public budget to research and development for 2016

Spanish government plans to invest 1,765 million euros in direct aid for innovation projects and 2,446 million euros for loans to enterprises. The resources allocated to direct aid will increase up to 15 per cent over this year and loans will decrease to 9 per cent. The government will give priority to areas considered most in need of development in science and technology such as Andalucia, Extremadura, Canarias, Castilla-La Mancha, Murcia, Galicia and Asturias. Among the actions to be undertaken in these regions, Bioeconomy will be boosted in the agri-food, biomass, bioenergy and bioproducts fields.

Furthermore, the Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI), the main driver of innovation in Spain, will have 30 million euros more for direct aid, 35.7% more than the previous year. The Spanish High Council Scientific Research (CSIC) will have 467 million euros next year and the Institute of Health Carlos III (ISCIII), 165 millions.

In spite of this state budget for 2016, Spain is still the 17th european country in gross domestic expenditure on R&D according to Eurostat.

Further sensitivity enhancement of HFF-QCM immunosensors for pesticides

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Authors: C. March, J.V. García, R. Fernández, Y.Jiménez, A. Arnau. A.Montoya

Event: 4th International Conference on Biosensing Technology, Lisbon (2015)

Recently, High Fundamental Frequency Quartz Crystal Microbalance (HFF-QCM) immunosensors have succesfully been developed. Therefore, sensitivity of QCM biosensors is no longer a drawback. Taking advantage of this previous work, we have developed a renewed highly sensitive HFF piezoelectric immunosensor using carbaryl insecticide as a model analyte for pesticide detection. To this purpose, 100 MHz quartz crystal sensors were used as the transducer elements of the biosensor and a monoclonal antibody-based competitive immunoassay was integrated as the sensing specific bio-recognition event. The biosensing interface was improved by employing mixed self-assembled monolayers (mSAMs) of alkane thiols as intermediate layers for surface functionalization. This approach allowed the covalent attachment of the assay conjugate (20.0 µg mL-¹ of BSA-CNH conjugate) onto the gold electrode surface in a more orderly and stable way than with simple SAMs. A very low concentration (1.0 µg mL-¹) of LIB-CNH45 monoclonal antibody was used for the competitive immunoassays. All immunosensor assays were performed in the AWS-A10 test platform from AWSensors. In terms of analytical performance, the new carbaryl HFF-QCM immunosensor showed higher sensitivity than the previously developed one, with analytical parameters very close to those of the most sensitive reported ELISA for carbaryl.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE POSTER about this work