Modern healthcare faces a fundamental challenge: while small molecules such as neurotransmitters,amino acids, and their metabolites provide powerful early warning signals for disease, they are very difficult to measure outside of specialised laboratories. Current clinical practice relies heavily on large instruments such as chromatography or mass spectrometry, which are expensive, time-consuming, and require trained operators. This makes routine monitoring of such biomarkers impossible, even though their levels are known to change in conditions ranging from endocrine tumours to cardiovascular disease and neurological disorders.
The SupraSense project was launched to tackle this gap. Its vision is to design a new class of synthetic chemosensors that are inexpensive, robust, and capable of detecting key biomarkers directly in biofluids such as urine or saliva. These sensors are built by combining nanoporous zeolite frameworks with fluorescent reporter dyes, creating artificial receptor pockets that can selectively bind biologically important metabolites and emit an optical signal.
The overall objectives of the project are:
• to expand the scope of detectable biomarkers from a single proof-of-concept to a panel of aromatic metabolites (e.g. serotonin, dopamine),
• to achieve clinically relevant sensitivity and selectivity, enabling direct application in medical diagnostics,
• to integrate automation and data science, including liquid-handling robots and advanced fitting algorithms, ensuring reproducibility and scalability, and
• to open up new opportunities for personalised medicine and related fields, by providing affordable and accessible metabolite monitoring tools.
The expected impact is substantial: SupraSense aims to transform metabolite detection from an expert-only task into a fast, low-cost, and widely available diagnostic platform, with benefits not only for patients and doctors but also for agriculture, biotechnology, and environmental monitoring.
