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Edible electronics is a growing field that aims to produce digestible devices using only food ingredients and additives, thus addressing many of the shortcomings of ingestible electronic devices. Edible electronic devices will have major implications for gastrointestinal tract monitoring, therapeutics, as well as rapid food quality monitoring. Recent research has demonstrated the feasibility of edible circuits and sensors, but to realize fully edible electronic devices edible power sources are required, of which there have been very few examples. Drawing inspiration from living organisms, which use redox cofactors to power biochemical machines, a rechargeable edible battery formed from materials eaten in everyday life is developed. The battery is realized by immobilizing riboflavin and quercetin, common food ingredients and dietary supplements, on activated carbon, a widespread food additive. Riboflavin is used as the anode, while quercetin is used as the cathode. By encapsulating the electrodes in beeswax, a fully edible battery is fabricated capable of supplying power to small electronic devices. The proof-of-concept battery cell operated at 0.65 V, sustaining a current of 48 mu A for 12 min. The presented proof-of-concept will open the doors to new edible electronic applications, enabling safer and easier medical diagnostics, treatments, and unexplored ways to monitor food quality.

By combining information such as genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics data, multi-omics methodologies have the potential to reveal the otherwise invisible processes of carcinogenesis. Using these data, a new generation point-of-care (POC) devices may support patient care through rapid diagnosis involving accurate and simultaneous multi-omics measurements. In this work we present a proof-of-concept portable system capable of measuring a metabolite (glutamate) and a protein (proteolytically active prostate-specific antigen - aPSA) simultaneously on single device in a two-minute interval using on-chip optical methods. The device has the potential to improve the current diagnostic pathways of prostate cancer by reducing the high false-positive rate with the widely used total prostate-specific antigen test. We demonstrate simultaneous assay of glutamate and aPSA in buffer and synthetic urine. For the glutamate assay, the limit of detection (LOD) and resolution were found to be 0.9 μM and 2.7 μM. LOD and resolution for aPSA were 0.5 ng/ml and 2.0 ng/ml. The LOD and resolution achieved using this device are therefore in line with human physiological ranges. The platform is suitable for accommodating two independent optical assays therefore chemistry can be modified to measure different analytes regardless of their nature. This technological breakthrough has the potential to deliver an accurate multi-omics portable device for prostate cancer and may be extended to other diseases.