Analytical micro and nano technologies meet sepsis diagnosis

Sepsis is one of the deadliest health disorders in the current century due to specific limitations in early and differential diagnosis. Therefore, early diagnosis and appropriate treatment of sepsis are crucial research areas to prevent human death worldwide. Among other clinical manifestations, protein biomarker detection has shown outstanding characteristics to provide relevant biological information to improve early sepsis diagnosis. However, currently used methodologies for analysing mentioned biomarkers still require long analysis times and large sample volumes, are not sensitive enough, or are not available as point-of-care/bedside analysis. Nevertheless, in the last decade, the emergence of micro and nanotechnologies-based biosensing approaches shows a high potential impact on diagnosing complex diseases such as sepsis. Throughout this critical review, micro and nanotechnologies have been revised towards the biosensing of the highly relevant protein sepsis biomarkers such as procalcitonin (PCT), C-reactive (CRP), and interleukin-6 (IL-6) in line with the analytical performance during the analysis of clinical samples and the main achievements in the field of sepsis diagnosis.