A biosensor to help rheumatoid arthritis patients

This Friday, 30 August, a team of EPFL students will take part in the SensUs competition at the Eindhoven University of Technology. This year's challenge is to develop a biosensor that can quickly measure concentrations in patients' blood plasma of adalimumab. The main active ingredient of one of the best-selling drugs in the world, which can have harmful side effects. Adalimumab is the hard-to-pronounce antibody that students are researching for the fourth annual SensUs competition, held by Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. The EPFL team, called EPFSens , is one of 14 from around the world that are developing a portable biosensor that can rapidly measure adalimumab concentrations. The SensUs competition was launched to encourage the development of biosensors for detecting biomarkers that have significant healthcare implications. This year, the competition's panel of experts chose adalimumab as the compound to be measured; it is sold under the brand name Humira and is used mainly as an injectable solution for treating rheumatoid arthritis.