How to design and manufacture a glucose strip?

Though Zimmer and Peacock design and manufacture sensors for ions, small molecules, proteins, enzymes, RNA, DNA, whole cells and microbes etc, we started a long time back designing and manufacturing glucose strips.

We recently had an enquiry with three questions:

• QUESTION ONE - How to design a new Glucose Strip?
• QUESTION TWO - How to optimize an enzyme solution formulation?
• QUESTION THREE? - How to produce test Stips fom A to Z/manufacture strips?

On this page we try to try to provide some technical answers to these questions. We also provide a short cut to all of these questions, which is Zimmer and Peacock have a glucose strip which can be purchased. We particularly recommend this as a way of accelerating your development.

QUESTION ONE - How to design a new Glucose Strip?

In order to design a glucose strip one needs to understand the anatomy of a glucose srip, that is why we direct people to our web page 'Hacking the Glucose Strip', on this page we lay out the architecture of a glucose strip. 

We recommend that if people are looking for a substrate to build their first glucose sensors on then the Zimmer and Peacock  Value Sensors are a good place to get some early samples; so they can start their preliminary work on a substrate that looks and feels like a glucose strip.

QUESTION TWO - How to optimize an enzyme solution?

If we dig into this question a little deeper there are three parts to this question:

1) Part One - How to optimize an enzyme solution in regard to the detection of glucose?

2) Part Two - How to optimize an enzyme solution with regard to the handling of the solution and manufacturing with the solution in the manufacturing process?

3) Part Three - What is the shelf life of teh strips made from the solution?

The answer is that when Zimmer and Peacock optimize any new solution for any new sensor and biosensor application we put more effort into this than anything else. We have calculated that when optimizing a sensor for both function and manufacturing we test over 100,000 strips. Completing this many tests requires a lot of manpower and a highly organised database to analyse all the data,we use a system called Julia to do this.

QUESTION THREE - How to manufacture strip?

There are several stages of manufacturing strips depending on how big your market is. ZP has written an article on scaling up manufacturing in the adjacent button.