Bajpai, Sonal and Toghill, Kathryn (2024) Non-Enzymatic Sensing of Creatinine for Early Detection of Chronic Kidney Disease. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.
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Abstract
Chronic kidney disease (CKD) affects a 8-16 % of the global population. Creatinine is a useful biomarker for screening and detecting CKD. Creatinine concentrations in urine outside the normal clinical range (4.4-13.3 mM) gives an indication of kidney conditions including CKD, and requires further evaluation by the nephrologists in secondary care clinical settings. The fact that CKD is asymptomatic, it is critical to detect it at earlier stages and prevent its rogression with medicines. Currently Jaffe reaction method of creatinine detection is the most widely used technique. Although, this significantly suffers from low specificity and high interferences from molecules including ascorbic acid. Enzymatic methods, although are highly specific, but have problems with high cost and low stability due to use of enzymes. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop low cost and simple non-invasive creatinine detection methods, which is the focus of this PhD project.We have developed a novel simple sensing mechanism based on bare glassy carbon electrode (GCE) which can detect creatinine electrochemically (LOD 60 µM and sensitivity 1.50 µA/mM) and colorimetrically (LOD 6.63 µM). An application for a patent has been made for this work. Additionally, nickel-based systems have also been studied to detect creatinine, although there is high interference to urea and requires further optimisation. SPE based creatinine sensing methods designed (LOD 60 µM) as part of a preliminary study in this project including surface modifications, aims to use creatinine sensing for POCT applications in future. Market testing of the concepts used in this project has informed us to evaluate albumin sensing.