Acute Kidney Injury Detection using Real Human Urine NGAL Biomarker Sensor based on 3D Graphene

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is not a specified symptom in the early stages. Frequency of AKI occurrence is highly correlated to Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD). Therefore, development of non-invasive, ultra-sensitive, and highly accurate sensing platform is crucial for early AKI diagnosis. Serum creatinine (SCr) level usually takes 24-72 hours to response to the incident of AKI. Meanwhile, urine Neutrophil Gelatinase-Associated Lipocalin (NGAL) takes only 2 hours to response after the AKI occurrence. In this work, we investigated the use of microporous graphene and dipole-dipole enhancement between graphene/nickel layers to enhance electrode sensitivity for urine NGAL level determination. Selectivity was assured using enzymatic electrochemistry. Once NGAL level was measured, a doctor can diagnose AKI under additional information on patient’s conditions. The result is promising since the detection range was 0.110 to 93.9 ng/ml and the correlation coefficient is 0.8235. The detection covered AKI primary diagnostic cutoff level at 87 ng/ml in urine. The electrochemical immunosensor was able to determine NGAL in Urine with results compared to those provided by the standard ELISA method. This work is a part of development of handheld NGAL determination strip in human urine samples and prepared portable NGAL sensing devices. Despite our investigation’s limitation, the acquired data indicates that non-invasive acute kidney injury detection using actual human urine with graphene foam/nickel-based electrochemical sensor should be further explored as an auxiliary diagnostic tool for AKI.