Twisted nanophotonic technology for integrated chiroptical sensing of drugs on a chip

Introduction

The quest for new medical drugs demands reliable, ultrasensitive, and fast techniques to identify, refine, and test small volumes of candidates for clinical trials. The efficacy of pharmaceuticals depends to a large extent on their chiral composition, and thus enantiomeric purity and selectivity is an important issue for the development of new drugs and to test their biotoxicity.

Project Overview

TwistedNano addresses this need with a new generation of integrated nanophotonic devices enabling ultrasensitive chiroptical spectroscopy of sub-nanolitre volumes, revolutionizing at-source the sensing technological toolbox for drug discovery and nanomedicine.

Market Demand

Because of governmental regulations, agencies require pharmaceutical manufacturers to systematically investigate most drug enantiomers to determine their safety and efficacy. Thus, the development of fast, compact, and accurate chiral sensing on a chip is one of the current primary targets of the nanomedicine industry, constituting a growing market that is already exceeding 100 billion Euros.

Technological Advancements

TwistedNano will result in a photonics-enabled chiral sensing technology that integrates vectorial structured light fields with almost arbitrary control onto a microfluidic chip, providing groundbreaking advantages compared to current instrumentation:

1. Remote/distributed analysis
2. Reduced sample consumption
3. Cost reduction
4. Parallelization
5. Increased diagnostic speed and sensitivity

Key Elements

Key elements developed for optofluidic integration include:

• Photonic crystal fibers
• Photonic nanostructures
• Metasurfaces operating in close synergy with cutting-edge chiroptical spectroscopic techniques

Future Prospects

In the mid-term, TwistedNano will not only lay the foundations of a new lab-on-chip chiral sensing technology revolutionizing drug discovery, theranostics, and nanomedicine, but also open a plethora of disruptive applications such as characterization of minute amounts of viruses and macromolecules in general.