Discretised microfluidics for noninvasive health monitoring using sweat sensing.

Using sweat instead of blood for monitoring chemical biomarker concentrations of hospitalised patients offers several advantages for both the patients and healthcare workers. Unlike blood, sweat can be noninvasively and continuously sampled without direct involvement of a professional, and sweat contains a rich composition of biomarkers. However, patients in resting state have extremely low sweat rates and they produce correspondingly small sweat volumes, which makes sweat sensing of hospitalised patients highly challenging.

A versatile artificial skin platform for sweat sensor development.

Research targeting the development of on-body sensors has been significantly growing in recent years - an example is on-skin sweat sensing. However, the wide inter and intra person variability of skin characteristics make testing of these sensors and included materials such as skin adhesives difficult, which hampers especially the initial development phase of such wearables. Besides the development of wearable sweat sensors, companies developing deodorants, cosmetics, medical adhesives and wearable textiles now need to perform expensive human subjects testing with little control over the exact sweat mechanisms.

Microelectrode Arrays for Simultaneous Electrophysiology and Advanced Optical Microscopy.

Advanced optical imaging techniques address important biological questions in neuroscience, where structures such as synapses are below the resolution limit of a conventional microscope. At the same time, microelectrode arrays (MEAs) are indispensable in understanding the language of neurons. Here, the authors show transparent MEAs capable of recording action potentials from neurons and compatible with advanced microscopy.

Inflammation-associated extracellular β-glucuronidase alters cellular responses to the chemical carcinogen benzo[a]pyrene.

Neutrophils infiltrate tissues during inflammation, and when activated, they release β-glucuronidase. Since inflammation is associated with carcinogenesis, we investigated how extracellular β-glucuronidase changed the in vitro cellular response to the chemical carcinogen benzo(a)pyrene (B[a]P). For this we exposed human liver (HepG2) and lung (A549) cells to B[a]P in the presence or absence of β-glucuronidase.

Defining adult asthma endotypes by clinical features and patterns of volatile organic compounds in exhaled air.

Background: Several classifications of adult asthma patients using cluster analyses based on clinical and demographic information has resulted in clinical phenotypic clusters that do not address molecular mechanisms. Volatile organic compounds (VOC) in exhaled air are released during inflammation in response to oxidative stress as a result of activated leukocytes. VOC profiles in exhaled air could distinguish between asthma patients and healthy subjects.