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Materials Research Project

Nanomagnetic Biosensors

This work builds on Dmitri Litvinov’s world-leading expertise in magnetic disk drive technology to make a biosensing platform with extreme sensitivity, and the advantages of ruggedness and low-cost electronics fabrication. Applications include molecular cancer diagnostics using tiny needle biopsies, and sensitive detection of biomarkers and disease agents. An array of GMR magnetic sensors, each vastly smaller than a human hair, will be used to detect the capture of sub-50 nm magnetic labels in the presence of targets.

The sensitivity of the device to low-abundance gene expression or proteins is expected to be unprecedentedly high, potentially at the single-molecule level. Data quality will be unusually good because non-specifically bound magnetic labels can be “pulled off” using a magnetic field source.

A practical sensor array could potentially achieve extremely high densities of individually-addressable sensors (up to 100 million per square millimeter).

Research Faculty

Dmitri Litvinov
Dmitri Litvinov
Moores Professor, Senior Associate Dean for Research and Facilities
Faculty Web Page
Richard Willson
Richard Willson
Professor
Faculty Web Page