Metabolomics on CMOS for personalised medicine

The emergence of personalised and precision healthcare requires detailed knowledge of human molecular pathology. Genomics has been transformed by sequencing technologies that can unravel the human genome in 1 day for less than a thousand dollars. Recently, metabolomics, the quantitative measurement of small molecules, has emerged as a field to study an individual’s molecular profile. This is very important because a genome can only give a prediction of an individual’s propensity to a disease – genotyping, while a metabolome can provide immediate diagnosis of biochemical activity in human body – phenotyping. However, the present approach of measuring metabolites depends on large and expensive equipment such as NMR spectroscopy and mass spectroscopy. More importantly, this equipment does not provide a single analytical platform to measure the entire metabolome. CMOS technology has made a major impact in personal mobile computing, digital imaging and communications as part of everyday life. CMOS provides a single integrated platform for sensing technologies, low-cost manufacturing and miniaturisation of microelectronic systems. CMOS has been used successfully to create an all-electronic sequencing technology. We anticipate that CMOS has the potential to allow multiple biomarkers to be monitored in parallel, thus paving the way for metabolome profiling. This review will provide a background to personalised medicine, in terms of genomics and metabolomics, to show the importance for future healthcare delivery. A theoretical background of enzymes for metabolite quantification will also be discussed. A description of DNA microarray technologies will be provided. A background of CMOS chemical sensor systems will be presented for DNA sequencing and metabolite quantification. Finally, a discussion of future CMOS sensor systems, microelectronics and integration technologies that could lead to new “omics” technologies, will be given