Avanços na Análise de Alergénios: Melhorar a Segurança Alimentar com Dispositivos Eletroquímicos baseados em Papel

This project addresses an important challenge in the field of food safety: the prevention of allergic reactions by developing sensitive and selective methods to comply with food labelling legislation. The overall goal of Sens2BiteSafe is to obtain integrated, portable, and cost-effective ePADs, capable of multiplexed allergen analysis, improving the quality of life of allergic patients and reducing food waste, production costs, and burdens associated with food allergy treatment. These ePADs could be transferred to the industrial sector and will benefit consumers, the food industry, and regulatory agencies, ultimately leading to accurate food labelling and a reduction of food allergic related events. Sens2BiteSafe is the continuation of previous FCT-funded project (TracAllerSens) in which we developed several immuno- and MIP sensors for food allergens, but weren’t able to (i) extend the immunosensors to celery and mollusc allergens and (ii) developed and/or validate the MIP sensors for all the allergens. This was mainly due to time limits because of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, with the knowledge we gained recently through the FCT-funded PaperSenseMIP project, among others, we believe we can continue the development of these sensors, improve the limits of quantification, simplify the analytical methods, and use paper as a support for the electrochemical cell to turn them more environmentally friendly and allow custom fabrication (design, area, multiplexed analysis, performance characteristics,...) to achieve excellent analytical tools. With the recent establishment of threshold levels in foods for the priority allergens [7], which were previously undefined, the required limits of quantification for analytical methods to meet Action Levels attest the suitability of some of the sensors we developed and opens the way for their application to the food industry and their production with commercialization possibilities in the future. To reach the overall goal of the project, the following specific objectives are established: * construction of small-sized electrochemical paper-based transducers using inkjet technology, which is still expanding in this field; * development of individual ePADs based on immunosensing for the analysis of food protein allergens, which are scarcely developed until now; * development of individual MIP and MIP ePADs for the analysis of food protein allergens, which are almost not available; * incorporation of nanomaterials, antibodies, and MIP in conducting inks for the use in inkjet printer cartridges for the simplified construction of ePADs for sensitive and selective allergen analysis, which is a novelty and will allow mass production and their commercialization; * the integration of multiple sensors on a portable ePAD able to quantify several allergens in a single analysis, which allows onsite, faster, and more complete analysis. * the use by factory operators of the different ePADs in several stages of the production processes of national food industries to identify cross contamination points that will improve these processes, product quality control, and label accuracy. This project is ambitious and will contribute to the state-of-the-art in two important fields: (1) new designs and applications of ePADs, that could be the subject of future commercialization; (2) improvement of the knowledge and tools available to control and monitor allergens in foods along the production chain.