Abstract
ii ABSTRACT In this thesis, an electrochemical biosensing platform using carbon nanotubes electrodes, which can be used to evaluate drug release profiles of antibiotic nanocapsules in real time and continuous mode, has been successfully designed, developed, and characterized. First, the electrochemical sensing electrode has been fabricated by MEMS technologies. Then, the biosensing platform is connected to the sensing circuit and LabVIEW program for signal acquire and processing. Finally, the developed carbon nanotubes electrode and electrochemical biosensing platform have been applied for pre-clinical evaluation of drug release profiles of antibiotic nanocapsules. The electrode is one of the key components for electrochemical sensing. The materials and the surface characteristics of electrodes play an important role in electrochemical sensing. Here, we successfully combined the carbon nanotubes electrodes with electrochemical biosensor, using electrophoresis deposition or drop-coating method to deposit carbon nanotubes on the surfaces of the gold electrodes. The measurement results show that the maximum affordable current has been improved 0.0208 mA to o.6680 mA. And, the sensing signals are amplified up to 13.75 times using carbon nanotube-modified electrodes. The linear range of the developed electrochemical biosensing platform using carbon nanotubes electrodes is from 1 g/ml to 10g/ml (R2=0.9837). The sensitivity of the developed system is 0.023 mA•ml/g. The HPLC and other traditional instrument could not detection the drug release from nanocapsules in real time and continuous mode. According to the measurements using our developed electrochemical biosensing platform, it shows that antibiotic nanocapsules start to increase the drug release on the 4th day and the release rate is 0.0258 μg/ml．hr. The drug release of antibiotic nanocapsules reached 24.98 μg/ml on the 7th day. The antibiotic biosensor platform using carbon nanotube electrodes for preclinical evaluation of drug release profile of nanocapsules presented in this work showed good performance in sensing of antibiotic Teoplanin drug samples. The antibiotic biosensor platform could be further integrated with a micro fluidic platform for controlled synthesis of nanocapsules to feedback the drug release profile for optimization of the synthesis process. In addition, the developed biosensor can be integrated with wireless passive transmission module to be an implantable biomedical microsystem for health monitoring in future.