Growth of gold-manganese oxide nanostructures on a 3D origami device for glucose-oxidase label based electrochemical immunosensor

Flexible biosensors are of considerable current interest for the development of portable point-of-care medical products, minimally invasive implantable devices, and compact diagnostic platforms. Here, we reported an electrochemical paper based analytical device fabricated (EPADs) by sequentially growing gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) and manganese oxide (MnO2) nanowires networks on a freestanding three dimensional (3D) origami device. This fabricated through the growth of an AuNPs layer on the surfaces of cellulose fibers in the screen-printed paper working electrode (PWE), and thus developed a gold paper working electrode (Au-PWE). Subsequently, MnO2 nanowires were successfully electrodeposited on Au-PWE to form a 3D network with large surface areas. Based on this novel EPADs and the principle of origami, we presented herein a simple immunosensing scheme using glucose oxidase (GOx) as an enzyme label, 3,3′,5,5′-tetramethylbenzidine (TMB) as a redox terminator, and glucose as an enzyme substrate. The electrochemical enzymatic redox cycling was applied to the detection of prostate protein antigen (PSA), a biomarker of prostatic cancer. The proposed method successfully fulfilled the highly sensitive detection of PSA with a linear range of 0.005 ng mL−1-100 ng mL−1 with a detection limit of 0.0012 ng mL−1. This EPADs exhibited high sensitivity, specificity and excellent performance in real human serum assay, and could be applied in point-of-care testing of other tumor markers for remote regions and developing countries.