Jessica Koehne

NASA Ames

Scientist

Bio – Dr. Jessica Koehne is a scientist at NASA Ames Research Center and Ames lead of the On-demand Manufacturing of Electronics group. She has spent the past 20 years developing carbon nanomaterial-based sensor platforms for point-of-care crew health monitoring. Dr. Koehne has authored over 60 peer-reviewed articles and received numerous honors and awards including the 2011 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) and the 2018 Women in Aerospace Achievement Award.

Abstract Title: In-Space Manufacturing of Point-of-Care Diagnostic Devices

Abstract Body: Miniaturized biosensing devices for point-of-care diagnostics are of upmost importance to ensuring astronaut crew health and safety. As human space missions extend to longer durations, sensor resupply will not be a viable option. By relying on additive manufacturing and simple printing technology, biosensors can be fabricated in space, thus enabling adaptive crew health monitoring on long-duration space missions and habitation. Here we report a generic electrochemical biosensor platform that can be fabricated using a single printer and will require minimal crew time to operate. Functional inks manufactured from carbon nanotubes, gold nanoparticles, and silver nanoparticles were used to print a 3-electrode elechemical device. Biosensor devices were fabricated on both paper and Kaptonīƒ’ substrates by either a piezo drop-on-demand inkjet printer and an atmospheric pressure plasma jet printer. The working electrodes were functionalized with both aptamer and antibody probes specific to troponin-I and cortisol. Sensor performance was characterized by cyclic voltammetry, differential pulse voltammetry, and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. The results demonstrate that these biosensors can serve a miniaturized, low-cost, point-of-care devices for detection of proteins, hormones, and other small biomolecules. In the future, these biosensor devices will be fabricated and characterized on the International Space Station and the approach will be evaluated for future in-space manufacturing of point-of-care diagnostic devices.