Can AI Biosensors Offer Accurate Stress Hormone Monitoring?

Easy "mix and read" test to use at home or in clinic with a smartphone app, just like a COVID test.

An important stress hormone named cortisol is essential for blood pressure and metabolism regulation in our body. Inadequate levels of cortisol may result in many health problems ().

Right now, you must go clinic or doctor's office to check your cortisol levels. But a new and more accurate test with artificial biosensors is being developed that you can use at home.

A professor named Andy Yeh from UC Santa Cruz invented a new type of artificial biosensor. This sensor emits luminescence when it finds cortisol, the stress hormone, in blood or urine. A recent study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, reveals that it can accurately measure healthy, low, or high cortisol levels.

Yeh demonstrated that this biosensor can be used in combination with the camera on a smartphone to enable people to measure cortisol levels at home or in a clinic, with high levels of sensitivity and without the costly instrumentation of the lab, greatly expanding access to accurate measurement of this important health indicator.

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An AI Designed Solution

Yeh is an expert in artificial protein design, a technique that uses AI-guided computation to design proteins completely from scratch. This varies from traditional approaches, which modify proteins found in the natural world.

To create a new detection system for cortisol, Yeh designed a protein-based biosensor in which the stress hormone triggers two designed proteins to come close to each other at the molecular level. This process leads to light emission, with more light indicating more cortisol.

To Yeh's knowledge, this is the first example of a completely computationally designed biosensor that can perform with such high sensitivity and dynamic range for detecting a small molecule analyte. Using a camera to measure the amount and color of light emitted allows cortisol levels to be read with more sensitivity than current tests provide.

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How the Sensor Works

This new diagnostic tool would be in a “mix and read” format—like the technique used in Covid-19 nasal swab rapid tests. The test requires just a drop of blood or urine, which is mixed with a solution that contains the biosensor. Then, a smartphone camera and app could translate the light emitted into a direct measurement of cortisol levels.

“You can read the signal directly — the output of the sensor is light emissions, so essentially you can just take a picture of the test with your smartphone,” Yeh said. “Ideally, that’s really field compatible.”

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The Future of Stress Hormone Monitoring

The test’s high level of sensitivity is a vast improvement over traditional tests, which do not usually offer enough quantitative results when outside of the cortisol normal range. Yeh’s solution covers a wider dynamic range, offering quantitative results for healthy, too-low, and elevated levels of cortisol.

“This sensor is very, very sensitive compared to the current standard methods used in the hospital,” Yeh said. “The dynamic range is huge compared to the traditional assay.”

Down the line, Yeh envisions that this technology may also be used in a drug-development or diagnostic setting to better understand and treat the health issues that arise from cortisol deficiencies or surpluses.

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