Günter Gauglitz

Front Matter: Volume 7312

This PDF file contains the front matter associated with SPIE Proceedings Volume 7312, including the Title Page, Copyright information, Table of Contents, and the Conference Committee listing.

Optical sensors for therapeutic drug monitoring of antidepressants for a better medication adjustment

Therapeutic drug monitoring provides the attending physicians with detailed information on a patient’s individual serum level especially during long-term medication. Due to the fact that each patient tolerates drugs or their metabolites differently a medication adjustment can reduce the number and intensity of noticeable side-effects. In particular, psychotropic drugs can cause unpleasant side-effects that affect a patient’s life almost as much as the mental disease itself. The tricyclic antidepressants amitriptyline is commonly used for treatment of depressions and was selected for the development of an immunoassay using the direct optical sensor technique Reflectometric Interference Spectroscopy (RIfS). RIfS is a simple, robust and label-free method for direct monitoring of binding events on glass surfaces. Binding to the surface causes a shift of the interference spectrum by a change of the refractive index or physical thickness. This technique can be used for time-resolved observation of association and dissociation of amitriptyline (antigen) and a specific antibody using the binding inhibition test format. An amitriptyline derivative is immobilized on the sensor surface and a specific amount of antibodies can bind to the surface unless the binding is inhibited by free amitriptyline in a sample. No fluorescent label is needed making the whole assay less expensive than label-based methods. With this recently developed immunoassay amitriptyline concentrations in buffer (PBS) can easily be detected down to 500 ng/L.

Recognition as a challenging label-free optical sensing system

Optical biosensors are increasingly used in application areas of environmental analysis, healthcare and food safety. The quality of the biosensor’s results depends on the interaction layer, the detection principles, and evaluation strategies, not only on the biopolymer layer but also especially on recognition elements. Using label-free optical sensing, non-specific interaction between sample and transducer has to be reduced, and the selectivity of recognition elements has to be improved. For this reason, strategies to avoid non-specific interaction even in blood and milk are discussed, a variety of upcoming recognition is given. Based on the classification of direct optical detection methods, some examples for the above mentioned applications are reviewed. Trends as well as advantages of parallel multisport detection for kinetic evaluation are also part of the lecture.

Front Matter: Volume 6755

This PDF file contains the front matter associated with SPIE Proceedings Volume 6755, including the Title Page, Copyright information, Table of Contents, Introduction (if any), and the Conference Committee listing.