Blickenstorfer, Yves

Student Projects

Are you a student looking for thesis or project in an interdisciplinary field with direct impact? We are looking for talented students who want to work on the development at home blood testing. Your field of study is less relevant than your motivation. We have projects in a wide range of topics ranging from biochemical assay development over microfluidics to electrochemistry or embedded electronics. If you are interested in solving challenging problems is such fields, please send me an email including your CV, transcript of records and motivation letter.

Research Interest

Electrochemical biosensing for at home blood testing

Current medical at-home tests such as the covid rapid test or the pregnancy tests lack in sensitivity and only provide a yes/no answer. Most diagnostically relevant blood markers require a quantitative results and lower detection limits. To overcome this drawback, we developed an electrochemical technology that can detect biomarkers at low concentration while delivering a quantitative result. The technology is based on cost effective electronics which is key to for the development of affordable at-home testing. The technolgoy has resulted in the ETH startup Hemetron with which I conduct my reasearch in collaboration.

Optical biosensing for interaction analysis in a complex environment

In the past I have worked on an optical technology for lable free detection of biomolecular interactions. Lable free optical biosensing is commonly applied in molecular interaction analysis, for example in drug developement. The field of label-free optical biosensing is dominated by refractometric technologies such as surface plasmon resonance. The high sensitivity of such technologies allows for detection of very small amounts of biological matter. However, refractometric sensing is susceptible to any undesired influence on the refractive index such as temperature fluctuations or non-specific binding. This limits the performance of such sensors in many applications. Conversely, diffractometric biosensors for example, focal molography only detect the diffracted light from a coherent assembly of analyte molecules. Thus any refractive index distribution that is noncoherent with respect to this molecular assembly does not add to the coherent signal. This makes diffractometric biosensors inherently robust and enables sensitive measurements without reference channels or temperature stabilization and overcome the limits of refractometric sensor.

external page Quantitative Diffractometric Biosensing
Blickenstorfer et al, Phys. Rev. Applied 15, 034023 (2021)

external page Total internal reflection focal molography (TIR-M)
Blickenstorfer et al, Sens. Actuators B Chem. 349, (2021)

Principles for Sensitive and Robust Biomolecular Interaction Analysis: The Limits of Detection and Resolution of Diffraction-Limited Focal Molography
Frutiger et al. Phys. Rev. Applied 11, 014056 (2019)